I would say they’re more like propped distractions that you either avoid or remove them and it makes it part of the fun to this way cool game!
Suggestion: Capturing dead (grey) pieces earns +0.5 points
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The grey pieces shouldn't be worth points, because everyone will drop the rest of the game to capture grey pieces, and it'll just make it boring. It's better to leave them there and have people fight each other, not go after dead pieces, in my ('humble' 
) opinion.
what about just clean all the pieces of a defeated player(except the king) as soon as he checkmated?
Oct 14, 2017
0
#5
tal_morphy, I disagree, we should not remove the gray pieces. They create new possibilities. They work as walls, they can stop a pawn and at the same time they can help another pawn to go to the 8th rank by a zigzag way, they can be a temporary hideout for an alive king etc.
Oct 14, 2017
0
#6
Skeftomilos, your idea looks fine and can be tested.
I have another option to test: The gray pieces are -1 point. If you capture one you lose 1 point. Why not?
@JohnHS if you are willing to take your time spending moves to collect 0.5 point valued pieces, I'll probably take my time to prepare a sneaky mating attack to your king!
@BabYagun what's the rationale behind penalizing the capture of dead pieces? I could understand it as a wacky rule for a crazy variant, but I am talking about the mainstream version here. :-)
that’s a great idea, baby
Oct 14, 2017
0
#9
Gray pieces are obstacles. But now it is very simple to remove them. If we make them cost "-1 point" the players will think twice before breaking those walls. So the walls will be stronger. Why don't we have any thing in the game that decreases the points? Seriously. Why?
seriously makes sense, yep
Removing the obstacles is already costly. It costs time. This is the reason why the players normally don't bother capturing gray pieces, except if there is no other way to achieve their goals (like promoting a pawn).
Imagine you have lined up your pieces against an enemy pawn that blocks your own advanced pawn. You are ready to capture it, and award yourself with one point, but on your next turn the pawn owner has timed-out, and now you have to capture the same piece for the cost of one point. How is this logical?
You know something that would be (somewhat) reasonable to cost points? Checks! A check is usually highly disruptive for everyone receiving it, so it's normal to take any opportunity to check your opponents. But if that opportunity was coming with a cost of, say, one point, players would think twice before messing-up their opponents play, especially the weakest ones.
Oct 15, 2017
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#13
Checks should not be "-1". One player has a king and a rook (or bishop + knight) another player has a king. The kings are in the center of the board. To checkmate the first player must do lots of checks.
About eating gray pieces: Even if you make them "+0.5" you reward a passive (sometimes coward) behavior. If we want players to fight we should not award this sort of points harvesting. But this is if we want them to fight, of course. Making gray pieces "-1" moves the player focus on to the coloured pieces or to find the optimal route (maneuvering between gray pieces).
Checks could be penalized only when at least three players are still in the game. But, OK, I agree that the idea is highly controversial!
As for players becoming point harvesters, running after dead pieces, I don't think that in the long run it'll be proved a successful strategy. Spending a dozen moves to earn 5 points is an unproductive way of utilizing the capabilities of your army. The player next to you may use this time to promote two of his pawns to queens, or establish a running initiative against your king. Do you really think that your 5 harvested points are going to compensate for his 2 extra queens, or for your compromised king position?
Oct 15, 2017
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#15
You said (at least twice) that eating gray pieces is an unproductive way, wasting tempos etc. Why in this case do you offer to award such an unproductive way? Do you want to send players a wrong way? Confuse them?
Oct 15, 2017
0
#16
-0.5 sounds better than +0.5 
Right now I like the way you can protect grey pieces to block the path to your king.
It just seams reasonable to me for the gray pieces to worth something. If some players take it as a message to go for harvesting points, let be it. Neither of us will be responsible for the outcome of their strategy.
Giving negative value to gray pieces is just not reasonable. It may lead to interesting gameplay, and puzzle-like situations that are fun and enjoyable. Especially if we go all the way and give them a huge negative value, like -5 or even -10. But we are talking about the mainstream version here, not about wacky variants. The rules of the mainstream version should feel as natural as possible IMHO.
A small positive value for the gray pieces could become relevant in this scenario: Two players have been eliminated, and the weaker player still in the game suffers a massive material disadvantage to his stronger opponent. For example he has only his king and two pawns left. Under the current rules the weaker player has no practical chances to increase his points. The stronger player will just squash him like a mosquito. Even if he wants just 1-2 points to improve his ranking, there is no point to continue fighting. By giving gray pieces a value, the weaker player now has a small chance!
Oct 16, 2017
0
#18
@Skeftomilos,
I spotted this thread after contributing a similar idea to a thread about "how to handle un-captured kings". An idea there, I feel, naturally extended here (and I'm interested to see that both ideas, coming from different angles, wind up at similar proposals). My proposal from the other thread has 2 parts:
1) Upon defeat, a dying-players' remaining pieces are re-painted as "coins", of following value:
*Pawn & promoted-queen: +0 (grey coins, identical behavior to exising "dead pieces")
* Knights: +1 coin (all value-add coins painted with some un-used color, e.g. white, purple, oranage, etc.)
* Rooks/Bishops: +2 coins
* Queen: +5 coins
* King: +20 coins
IMO, this makes for a much more fair handling of player A who attacks player B's queen while player C moves in for checkmate. If Player B's position becomes hopeless and he/she resigns, it seems unfair that Player C stands to gain a monstrous +20 vs +0 edge over A; a +20 vs +5 seems a much more natural reflection of the role each of Player A and Player C had in the attack of Player B.
2) The player with "last king standing" collects all the uncollected coins on the board. This would seem to go a long way to the fairness of "claim win"... with this new system, a player needs to establish a much higher level of dominance over 2nd place before knocking them out. I have been in many games where I've felt I had major strategic advantage over a player who over-extended in order to get "cheap" points quickly... only to have them claim a win before I can take advantage of a "win the war, not the battles" strategy.
@kevinkirkpat about dead pieces depicted as coins, I don't like it personally. Culturally chess is about black and white, not about gold and silver. An example of a game that uses metals instead of colors to differentiate players is Arimaa, and it's the main reason I don't like the game (I dislike the Au metal).
About dead pieces having different values, I have suggested something similar for a variant that would uncouple any connection between piece mobility and value. I proposed halving the value of the dead pieces (rounding up). I don't think that the idea stands for the logic-oriented, mainstream version of the game, where the pieces are valued according to their mobility. A dead queen is no more mobile than a dead pawn, so why should she worth more? In fact, since the mobility of dead pieces is zero, the only reason for giving them a value would be for their tendency to restrict the mobility of live pieces.
About the last standing player collecting the points off all leftover pieces, it would make point harvesting not only a viable strategy, but a must-do procedure in order to win certain endings. I don't think that going after immovable targets is a particularly demanding or enjoyable feat to accomplish, and forcing players to complete such a task in order to win would take some fun out of this game.
Dead pieces are dead, but not disembodied. You can't pass throw them, and you must spend valuable moves to kick them out of the way. It's not rare for dead pieces to enhance the defensive fortress of an opponent still in the game. No less bothersome are dead pieces blocking the advancement of your just-one-square-to-promote pawns. You must spend 3 moves to remove the obstacle: threaten the dead piece, capture it, remove your piece, and then promote. And what do you gain while doing this? Nothing. So I propose to give dead pieces a value. They are immovable targets, so are easier to capture than a live pawn, so they must worth less than a pawn. A value of half a point seams reasonable to me. What do you think?