Happy belated anniversary to your post.
Omega Chess is very interesting. IMO I actually really like it and appreciate it as a very well thought-out big board variant, though I’m not going to claim it’s an improvement over plain old chess.
The new pieces integrate into the opening surprisingly well. They’re far more balanced than more classical “fairy-pieces” (the most official generic term for non FIDE chess pieces that I’m aware of) like in Capablanca chess — there’s a weird elegance in that the three leapers jump to mutually-exclusive spaces, creating sort of a rock/paper/scissors feel among them. Should note that Knights are much weaker in this game, though the advanced Knight rules interest me as a reasonable way to even things out (I haven’t tried them). I find the endgame with the corner spaces quite interesting as well, not a negative to the game.
The two biggest downsides are basically:
1. Difficult for new players to learn the new pieces. Most new FIDE players have most difficulty learning the Knight, and the new pieces are even less intuitive. I know the pieces now, but there will be lots of accidentally sacrificed pieces along the way.
2. Like most big board chess, the games get pretty long. I think the shortest non-blunderous game took about 45 minutes (perhaps in part to #1 discussed above)
The primary reason it’s not available, I suspect, is that it’s a commercial game. I know game rules aren’t really patentable per se, but I’d guess there would be legal barriers.
With that said, I’d absolutely love to see Omega Chess on chess.com.
I'm looking for anyone who has ever played omega chess before? Is it fun? Or does it just complicate chess in general? This variation of chess has two additional pieces ( one is called a champion, it moves two space forward, backward, or diagonal.) and its played on a bigger board. If anyone has any information on this, can you share your experience of the game? It looks fun, but there's got to be a reason why chess.com doesn't have this option available for game play.