Gonnosuke wrote:

Gothic Chess would also be quite interesting.

I like the concept of 10 x 8 chess with the extra two pieces (I cut & glued some pieces and boards from two cheap chess sets to make a Capablanca chess set), but honestly, the commerciality of Gothic Chess bothers me.

It's certainly an intriguing 10x8 starting position (in most historical archbishop + chancellor variants, not all the pawns are protected, as they are in orthodox chess), but it seems increasingly absurd that the starting position is copyrighted.  There would have to be a legal contract of some sort to even allow chess.com to use that starting position.

As far as I'm aware, there exist no such legal limitations on Carrera, Bird, or Capablanca chess, as well as Capablanca Random Chess (which can generate any of the other mentioned variants, except Gothic Chess, legally).

Furthermore, I wouldn't want to slander anyone, but I'd recommend checking out this wikipedia discussion page on the inventor of Gothic Chess sometime.

Interesting reading Random, thanks. 

Recently signed up at gothic-chess.com but have yet to play a game....have my hands full with Go right now;)

Great!

I would like to play Chinese chess (Xiangqi), the most played form of chess in the world, Japanese chess (Shogi), the most complex version of chess in the world, Korean chess (janggi), similar to Xiangqi, Thai/Combodian chess (Makruk), a form of chess played at a very high competition level, Shatranj, an ancient form of chess played 1000 years ago, or maybe even Mongolian chess (Shatar), a form of chess before the USSR.  Yeah, Chess960 and Bughouse are really fun, but I would like to see how I do with chess I'm not familiar with.  Side note: does anyone know where I can play online Go?

 so much... how does this deal with chess variants, the topic of this forum?

correspondence style:

http://www.online-go.com/

http://www.dragongoserver.net/

Real-time play:

http://www.gokgs.com/applet.jsp

 thank you

Amen to that. I got excited looking through the support FAQ pages when i saw "How to castle in Chess 960" and assumed the site supports it. Too bad it doesn't - i think it's great for playing minus opening theory and working on tactics right from the start of the game.

  Saying that, I think fixing the disconnect issues in live chess would certainly take priority over introducing any variants. 

not sure, but it deals with your opinions