My Custom Variant: Upgrade Chess

so if they were two or two+ {ex3,5,8} kings then how would checks/checkmate work

they promote to non royal kings

good idea

take most of them and checkmate the last one

Understood but coding multiple kings is just very very hard. I explained this in ultra chess a few minutes ago but if you want to code this, Try GL. I am a pretty tiny coder you can't truly code so I guess I could be wrong but you have to get developers to code multiple kings. (It is not in level creater)

They promote to non-royal kings.

that would make them not very good

How so? Kings can move in any direction, having them not be royal just makes them more useful…

Kings are not very strong pieces, A knight is better than a king at all times.

Actually, that's not always true. Although knights can move much faster, they can't block pieces by themselves. There's lots of other utility to kings that I won't get into, but suffice to say they're worth the same as a knight, maybe slightly less. Also, the king promotion isn't supposed to be strong, it's just so that upgrading pawns still gives a new promotion option.

From the playtesting I've done, pawns are a great option to upgrade. Although you gain little material, you gain much more control and structure, and it's quite difficult to play against them in the opening. Upgraded knights are great because they control so much space, can't be blocked without pinning them, and get even better at forking. Upgraded bishops are good as well because they are no longer color-bound, they can mutually protect a knight or each other, and they can be on the same color as each other. Upgraded rooks are helpful because they protect the king even more after castling, they're very hard to stop, and one jump can fork many different pieces. The upgraded queen isn't that good because it's only one piece that gets stronger, but if you keep it until late midgame and beyond, it's unstoppable.

Upgraded pawns are strongest in the opening and decrease in power after that. But they do their job well, taking up space immediately.

Upgraded knights are strongest in the midgame and almost as strong in the opening, as it forces the opponent to always over-guard their pieces and stay on the back ranks.

Upgraded bishops are strongest in the midgame and almost as strong in the opening, as they take up so much space and are hard to get rid of if you position them properly.

Upgraded rooks are strongest in the endgame, as they can easily force checkmate with little help, and can take the opponents remaining material with little struggle.

An upgraded queen is strongest in the endgame, as it can easily force checkmate with no help, and can fork pieces with almost no limits.

Their relative power levels go roughly in reverse order of their material worth, with pawns being the strongest, bishops being next, then knights, then rooks, and then queens. However, this is what I've gotten from playing against somewhat low-rated players (mostly 800-1200), and I'm a low-rated player myself. This likely affects the results, so if anyone has different experiences with this variant, please say so.

What do you think about this kind of upgrade chess:
0. Initial position is like in standard chess with all standard pieces. Each player has 0 (zero) upgrade points.

1. With every move done by a player the quantity of available upgrade points for him increases by 1 (for example, 0 to 1 after the 1st move, 1 to 2 after the 2nd move etc.).

2. Number of available points for each player is displayed aside the chessboard - like a set of spare pieces in crazyhouse chess. Every player can see his own upgrade points and opponent's uprgade points.

3. Every next move by any player (in his turn) may be made by traditional chess move (to move a piece to a free square, to move piece to a square with opp's piece capturing that piece etc.) or by upgrading one of his pieces existing on the board.

4. For any uprgade to be allowed a player needs to have enough upgrade points for the desired upgrade.

5. Every uprgade option has its own "price" nominated in uprgade points.

Pawn -> Sergeant

Knight -> Wildebeest

Bishop -> Archbishop

Rook -> Chancellor

Queen -> Amazon

6. Every upgrade of any piece in the game notation looks like Pd2=S, Nb1=W, Bc1=A, Ra1=C, Qd1=Z

7. When a player upgrades a piece - the quantity of his available uprgade points decreases by the price of the upgrade made. For example, if uprgade of rook to chancellor costs 4 points, and before this upgrade the player had 10 points - then the new number of points is 10-4=6.

8. In bullet, blitz, rapid games there could also be a variant of conversion of uprgade points to seconds.

So it counts as a move to upgrade? Also, somebody start coding!!!, This could take a year+ to code and I don't even know if this would be possible. I guess setup chess kind of proves this concept is viable but hard to code. Notations work like 123=4. 1 is the piece you start with and 4 is the piece you end with. 2 is letter and 3 is number on chessboard notations.

I just caught an error. You say "Queen -> Amazon" and "Qd1=Z". Inless amazon is a Z but every other WON follows the rule of the first letter. I love catching errors, sorry. (I did not make any other error two sentences ago "I Swear" "Nope" "0 Error".

1. Yes, it counts as a move to upgrade one piece.
2. Letter "A" is for Archbishop. So we need another letter for Amazon. If you dislike "Z" - what about "M"?

??

A is for Amazon on variants

H is for Hawk) (Archbishop’s old name)

Why not AM and AR?

This wasn't supposed to be a submission for chess.com, it was supposed to be me asking for input on a custom variant I made to play irl.

So you have archbishop pieces and will not play this online. What is the point of the forum if this is not made on chess.com? If this is not made this forum is useless!

How is it useless? This club is for discussing variants, and I had a custom variant that I wanted feedback on, so I posted on here and got good feedback that helped improve the quality of the variant. Just because it's not a variant submission doesn't mean I can't talk about it on here.

"helped improve the quality" what's the point of the quality of a variant if nobody is playing it?