Variants: Blind opens, White Balancing, Double pawns, King promotes and Range Limits

Some ideas I had for Chess variants are:

1) Imagine each player selected what their initial first few moves might be (this might need to exclude captures or pushing pawns past the 4/5 row, or ignore or stop early moves that result in captures or attempting to 'push' a blocked pawn)

Also, maybe to help equalize advantages between sides and give a more concrete example, imagine the white side player could select their first 4 moves and black could select their first 3 moves (in order to help compensate for black having a slight disadvantage).

Then the regular game play begins, in this case, with black decided what their 4th move will.

I imagine this could be a fun way for people to explore different opening strategies and testing them out against other players.

2) As a semi "Uber" improvement to make pawns stronger, imagine that if a player does a pawn move, then the player can also do a second pawn move 'for free' on their turn ... and maybe even allow a single pawn to be moved TWICE in a turn ... imagine how frighteningly nasty pawns could be!!! LOL

3) What if pawns could promote to become kings too?  A suggestion, in the case where there are two or more kings would be to remove the normal rules about pieces being 'pinned' or denying a king to enter into a threatened position, whenever a player has MORE than one king, and then revert to normal rules when a player only has one king (left).

4) Similar to making pawns more powerful, an alternate idea to help equalize the strength of different pieces could be to limit how many squares a bishop, rook of queen can move.

As an idea, imagine bishops can move a maximum of 4 diagonals, rooks can move a maximum of 3 and queens can move up to 2.

5) And as an idea to help integrate such variants into more normal match requests, maybe a player could select which variants they are willing to accept for a game and then when matches occur, players who have selected the most number of matching variants are grouped for a game.

Just some ideas to toss around.  I enjoy this site.  Thanks for the fun *thumbs up*