Tile chess maybe? a box n (Usually <5) boards high stack on top of each other. You can make one move on a board, or you can "tunnel" a piece to a board immediately above or below it on the same square. Pieces can be captured this way, and can give check. Kings are normal pieces until you only have one left, and the laws of chess apply. I personally like the 3 board version of this one ;)

Good idea, but now at first, i look only 8x8 chess table variants...

MORE IDEAS PLZ!

Switch chess : You start normal, and pieces move normally, and the idea is to checkmate, but a move is also legal if 2 pieces switch with another. You can only switch captured pieces with a non-captured one ;)

Atomic is nice. In atomic, a capture also removes the capturing piece and the pieces on all 8 surrounding squares (like an exploding atomic bomb).

This leads to nice variations such as 1.Nf3 Nf6 2.Ne5# mate; black can't defend against both Nxd7 and Nxf7, both of which would remove the king on e8. Therefore (I think) 1.Nf3 e5 is forced, and now if white were to play 2.Nxe5, his knight is gone so there is no mate.

Often the center is quickly filled with pawns (like 1.d4 d5 2.e4 e5) that stay for a while, since a capture would place themselves in check (3.exd5 isn't possible because 3...Qxd1 captures the king).

Hmm. I just checked Wikipedia, and it says that pawns aren't removed. Well, then I used to play a different version :-)

 1. dxe8 and the game's over

 His first sentence is wrong. The set up is the same as for normal chess, however, the direction of the pawns is reversed. That is, your pawns are coming towards you instead of going towards your opponent. So you can't move any of your pawns to start. You have to move a knight, and then you can move a pawn into the space where the knight was and promote it to a queen.

 Ok, I was quite confused there for a moment.

im fine with just 960 but it would be pretty cool if it was on live chess :)

Bughouse would be great.

Great lol!

Updated!

Put Bughouse there coz all wants that

Omega chess, I have been playing it on an e-mail games server for a while now. It's almost like an expansion of a regular board and setup.

Omega chess is interesting, indeed...

I put it in Play by mail-section...

Hmm... I wonder if there is some kind of variant, where you play 2vs2-team match, both are same colored, but it will be played on 2 boards AND set-up is symmetrical? (like this:

That sentence was copied straightly from Wikipedia...

The traditional "extinction chess" variant that I know has a different winning condition: capture of all pieces of the same type (ie. both B's, both N's, both R's, the K, the Q, or all 8 pawns) wins. It's quite playable, avoids book, and demands at least as much skill as regular chess ... perhaps more skill tactically.

I did list that already though, pathfinder416

I just recently published a short fantasy story on the Amazon Kindle featuring a number of new chess variants that I developed:

"The Amnesiac's Quest" (available on the Amazon Kindle for 99 cents)

Here are some of the variants portrayed in the story:

Promotion Chess

Attrition Chess

Melee Chess ("Chesskers")

Diamond Chess

Parasite Chess

Most of these variants would be challenging to play unless one had multiple identical chess sets, since they use more than the standard number of each type of piece.  This is because in many of these variants, each piece has the ability to change its rank to become another type of piece based on what it does in the game.

While trying to play these variants, I realized that I had to make my own chess set that would allow me to quickly transform one piece into another.  The result?

Chess Cubes! (available on Etsy.com)

I've made a few sets of Chess Cubes, and they're available for sale on Etsy in two varieties: "Psychedelic", and "Coal and Marshmallows".

If you are interested in trying out the variants from the story, then my hand-crafted custom-made chess set is the perfect way to do it.

unfair chess:white gets to move a hundred times before black gets to move