Vote for January's Golden Variants (2026)! - Chess Forums

Jan 16, 2026

0

#1

Post for the previous month's vote:
https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/vote-for-decembers-golden-variants-2025

Not sure on what some of the terms in this post mean? Have any other questions? See any typos? Feel free to ask and comment below!

(Scroll down to the start of the bold text if you want to know how to vote without reading my entire post 😀)

Welcome back everyone to Golden Variant! We're back for 2026, and hopefully this year will bring more surprises and exciting events to the world of Custom Variants in unexpected ways. This is now the 3rd year of this arena series since it was revived after a long period of inactivity. What started as an infrequent occurrence is now a highlight of the arena schedule on the variants server and has brought many new interested users to our club here!

If anyone out there reading this hasn't checked out this year's schedule yet, I would highly recommend doing so! All the new changes to our format for 2026 are listed there and offer a ton of other really cool and interesting pieces of information that I couldn't possibly include in every single one of these posts. Still, here are some of the highlights as a TL;DR (or maybe hopefully just a DR):

Golden Variant is now a bi-weekly event. All NCV and LCVs featured in the cycle will be listed in the quarterly Platinum Variant vote, unlike last year when only the top 5 were allowed.
This means that biases in favor of or against variants with different arena lengths, potentially time controls, or just an unlucky feature period has hopefully been eliminated.
Platinum Variant will continue to be a 1-week prized event held every 3 months, giving membership prizes to the top 3 finishers of the arena!
Golden Variant All Week is now rebranded as Emerald Variant, and is also now 2 weeks long. Newly accepted NCVs are automatically added to the schedule and eligible for Platinum Variant candidacy.
Golden Fortune, unlike the regular Golden Variant, usually occurs on the last week of months with 5 weeks, or directly after a Platinum Variant arena. It features a Wheel of Fortune variant instead of a New Custom Variant or Listed Custom Variant.
The default time controls for GV arenas are now 3|2, 3|0, and 1|2, and can vary based on the variant.

For January's voting, the first 3 weeks have already been predetermined; in honor of our most newly accepted variant Rose by @2bHNST, the first ever Emerald Variant has been scheduled featuring it, and the WoF variant Stereo Jungleness by @chye3mc has been selected by the CGAs as the Golden Fortune for January.

Switching over briefly to the topic of the testing team and variant submissions, we are of course aware that the Variants World submission portal is currently down. Rest assured, this is simply a minor inconvenience that happens every few months that we simply have to deal with in order to keep the site running as best as possible. This unfortunately means that I have no current stats on testing at the moment, but we have been working hard on getting verdicts out and are under 50 submissions with most of the oldest posts cleared out already! We are excited to have more authors taking up the task of creating, testing, revising, and submitting variants, but of course delays are always to be expected as the growth increases.

As always, if you want to see the NCV Testing Team's progress and what variants they've recently reviewed and given a verdict on, check out the Variant Verdict Feed (also sometimes shortened to VVF) at https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/variant-verdict-feed.

Now, onto the voting!

Format of this month's GV cycle:

Week 1 (January 2-16): 336-hour (2-week) Emerald Variant
Week 2 (January 16-23): 168-hour (1-week) Golden Fortune
Week 3 (January 23-February 6): 336-hour (2-week) Golden Variant (this is what you're voting for!)
Please see for more detailed information: https://www.chess.com/clubs/forum/view/2026-golden-variant-schedule

The voting process:

A comment will be added below this main post with 5 variants listed. You may use the hyperlinks on the variant names in order to see what the variant is if you are unfamiliar with any of them!
Simply react to the comment with the emoticon corresponding to the variant you want to be featured to vote for it! You may vote for more than one variant.
The winner of the vote will be selected for and featured in the upcoming Golden Variant arena starting on January 23.
Voting will end on January 21, 0 UTC!

See an example of a previous vote below: