Chess, Street Fightin' Style

First up, apologies. I didn't expect that there'd still be readers and commenters to this blog, so I failed to publish a few reader comments. But they are there now.

With that out of the way, here's another idea to "improve" chess, raising excitement by making a good fight out of every game. There is talk if a "midline invasion", armies and "duelling". But I don't know, this notion really doesn't sound like chess to me. Plus I would have thought that the long-established Fischerandom already makes for a good alternative variant. On duelling:

The final addition is duelling, a real-time double-blind bidding mechanic. To quote from the official Chess 2 rules, "Duelling allows you to spend a new resource called stones to threaten to destroy a piece that takes one of your pieces." Duels can be initiated whenever a piece is captured, and they work a little like rock, paper, scissors, with a hidden number of stones clenched in each player's closed fists and then revealed at the same time. All stones revealed are destroyed, and the winner is the player who showed the most stones. The long-term strategy comes from the fact that, when you're out of stones, players can still duel against you - and they win automatically.

You can read more of this here - Chess 2: The Sequel - How a street fightin' man fixed the world's most famous game. And a hat tip to The New Statesman.