Two Princes - The queen is just too powerful imho so here is a queen free variation.
Game starts with two princes (use king pieces) in the king and queen positions (d1,e1, and d8,e8)
Each prince moves like a king. i.e. one step in any direction. (but not like a knight).
Lose one prince and the other becomes a king with the usual check and checkmate rules.
A pawn reaching the 8th rank can promote to a prince, or any other piece as usual. (I estimate prince to have a value in terms of attack/defence between a minor piece and a rook.) If it promotes to a prince, then an existing king is demoted to prince.
Short castleing only.
Comment?
why not to introduce "Self-Partnering" for "Doubles (Bughouse)" too?
Self-partnering bughouse
1.
In November 2021, Chess Dot Com added "Self-Partnering, Play both sides of the team" as a variant for one of the main types of Four-Player Chess (4PC). In self-partnering games, each player controls two of the four colours.
https://www.chess.com/variants/4-player-chesshttps://www.chess.com/variants/self-partnerI don't practise 4PC variants, but I know they are very successful -- including the self-partnering one, I guess.
2.
Instead, I am personally interested in bughouse and crazyhouse.
Crazyhouse is alright. It can be played on Chess Dot Com and other platforms. Only one board, only two players, normal clock settings.
But, what about bughouse? "Doubles (Bughouse)", as they are called on Chess Dot Com.
https://www.chess.com/play/online/doubles-bughouseA game of "Doubles (Bughouse)" needs two teams, with four players in total, like Four-Player Chess. That's ok. Playing bughouse (on Chess Dot Com or elsewhere) works and may be very fun, especially if your partner is a person you know -- and a smart player.
3.
Anyway, chess is (usually, mostly) an individual game. Bughouse can be converted to an individual game too. It's a simple idea: self-partnering, just as in Self-Partnering 4PC.
I suppose self-partnering bughouse has already been practised by a lot of people (a few people?), but maybe it has never been implemented on online platforms. I don't know.
Each player plays on two boards, with two separate clocks (special clock settings could be made available, but are not really necessary). Player one is white on board A, and black on board B; and player two is the same, vice versa.
So, two chessboards and two clocks on my computer screen, including two sets of captured pieces to be dropped (but only one set of draw/resign buttons and only one chat).
4.
I think there would be no serious technical difficulty. Are the two clocks a problem? But Self-Partnering 4PC already has that feature, right? And the weird and enormous boards of a lot of other variants are much wider than two normal chessboards...
I'm sure that Chess Dot Com is the right place for the subvariant I'm proposing. I would find it very interesting and exciting, and plenty of other chess fans would play and love it too, I think.
5.
Consider that bughouse is one of the top chess variants, and one of the very few several-decade-old important ones.
Chess Dot Com developers make great efforts to add and maintain so many checky spelly jungly XXLy and 4PCy variants, and that's ok since a lot of people need them... But I'm sure that proper chess-like games will never be disregarded.
Please also note that crazyhouse is not a replacement for self-partnering bughouse. Bughouse and crazyhouse are very different from each other, though they share the same basic principle.
6.
(In addition to that, a further improvement would be allowing a mixed type of bughouse: a self-partner versus a two-player team -- with the possibility of special clock settings: see the clock settings for simultaneous games in https://lichess.org/simul ).
Thanks for your attention, and greetings from the Tuscany region of Italy.
Emanuele
https://sites.google.com/site/emanuelesaiu/chess