I've been thinking about variants of chess lately, and I was thinking of a slight change of the chess960/fischer random chess setup.

If you don't know the rules of chess960, and don't know about the alternate form of castling that makesthe game chess480, look on the wikipedia article.

I would propose a variant where the simple castling rules are used, and if the white king is left of the queen, as it will be half of the time, the black pieces should be in direct opposition to the white pieces, as they are in the regular rules, but if the white king is right of the queen, the black pieces are reversed. For example, if white gets the regular chess arrangement of RNBQKBNR from a to h, the chessboard is set up as if it were regular chess but black's king and queen are swapped.

This would still mean that there are 960 configurations, since every setup for white is unique and doesn't just result in a mirror image setup, because the mirror image has different setup rules for the black pieces. It would also mean that the regular chess setup never occurs directly (but it does appear mirrored, and with the exact some strategy). This appeals to me: if you want to play with the normal setup for chess, you don't do that by playing chess960.

What are any of your thoughts?