What is the best chess variant ?

Popular opinion : automate 

But yours ?

Hmm , no idea

Metamachy is one of the best chess variants that I have ever played
(1) This chess variant can be enjoyed and played for over 100 moves before resigning or agreeing to a draw
(2) New tactical possibilities that does not exist in orthodox chess due to diversity of pieces and their non-overlapping movements (for example in Trice's chess and Grand chess the chancellor just overlaps the movements of knight and rook and the archbishop just overlaps the movements of knight and bishop)
(3) Due to plenty of (distinct) pieces on the board, each of them with different strength, even if a player is down in material, that player will have more opportunities to exploit opponent's mistakes and win back material than in orthodox chess (when there are too many pieces on the board)
(4) The choice of the pieces are perfect for this chess variant to be enjoyed on a 12×12 board, for all of them to co-ordinate together well to checkmate the opponent's king (unlike Gigachess played on a 14×14 board and Terachess played on a 16×16 board which have too many corporals, many pieces have overlapping movements and few powerful pieces are sufficient enough to checkmate the opponent's king)

Players can read the rules of this chess variant, play with AI online or try out two player online games over hereby: https://jocly.jcfrog.com/joclymatch/gamespanel.php

Honestly, I like banishment chess the most, it's the suggestion #25 here:

https://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/hypothetical-rule-changes

Basically, it's a variant in which you can remove a piece instead of moving it. Can't find it as an existing variant on any website, though.

any dice chess with more than one dice. 3 dice chess is the best option.

Chaturaji, closely followed by Fog of War

Hi all! I would like to invite you to play a new kind of chess. Try please https://alternative-chess.tk/

Thank you very much for your comment. I do not over-promote my variants as some others do with no shame, so I appreciate a lot. 
Concerning Gigachess and Terachess, there are version II now, not in Jocly because this platform has stopped, but available to play on chessvariants.com . Details can be found on http://history.chess.free.fr/chessvariants.htm (my own website).
I tend to agree with you about compound pieces which are somewhat kind of chimaera or "Frankenstein" pieces. You may like Zanzibar-S, another variant of mine, also in chessvariants.com, ready to play. Thanks again

thanks!

Are you the designer of Wild Tamerlane chess? Why do colour bound pieces like Bishops, Elephants and Camels start off in the same coloured squares that puts more control on the half of the squares and puts no control on the other half of the squares?
Perhaps, if never moved, one and only one of the pair of colour bound pieces like Bishops, Elephants and Camels can be swapped off with an adjacent piece for each player at the start of the played game as like Bishops in Modern chess?

One of the most bizarre chess variants is to play chess moves on a Scrabble board.

Scrabble3D application, only for PC and not for mobile devices, available from https://sourceforge.net/projects/scrabble/ supports that.
Board sizes in 2D can be varied upto 48×48 and games can also be played in 3D. Players can also create their own dictionaries and play with them.
Letter distribution, points for each letter, number of tiles in each of player's racks and number of blanks used in game can also be customized as per player's wishes.
Small percentage of all tiles can also be tiles which are randomly picked up by the computer from the letter set.

absolutely baby chess

Xiangqi and Makruk

Yes, I had it wrong on Wild Tamerlane chess. Wild Tamerlane chess has flaws.

Usually in all chess variants, all colour bound piece pairs (like Bishop, Elephant and Camel in Wild Tamerlane chess) start off with one piece in light square and another piece in dark square. Otherwise it is impossible to use Bishop pair and so Elephant pair and Camel pair in middle game, end game or to checkmate opponent's king. (Elephant and Camel are much weaker than Bishop in an 11×11 board as used in Wild Tamerlane chess and so are their pairs). If both Bishops start off in dark squares, then dark squares will be more dominant in movement and in control by the pieces than the light squares and so the piece movement and the piece control of all the pieces will not be spread uniformly throughout the board.

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The following is just an idea, not a flaw.

In Metamachy, the royal pieces are Queen, Eagle and Lion which Pawns and Prince can promote to, at the last rank. The Lion is much more powerful than the Queen and Eagle because although it is short ranged, it can leap over other pieces up to 2 squares in any given direction. The Dragon or Amazon in Musketeer Chess is even more powerful than the Lion because it combines the movement of Queen and Knight and it has even more squares to move and to control than the Lion and no less. The Musketeer Chess at Vchess.club uses only 7 pieces and drops off the powerful Chancellor, Archbishop and Dragon. However, of the 10 Musketeer Chess pieces, only the Dragon is much more powerful than the Queen and all the remaining 9 being with power inbetween that of Rook and Queen, although the Chancellor is worth slightly less but almost equal in power to that of a Queen. The Archbishop should have lesser power than Chancellor and Queen because it combines the power of Knight and Bishop, but more than each of Knight and Bishop combined because unlike a Bishop which is colour bound and so confined to the squares of a same colour, the Archbishop can switch over between light squares and dark squares.

I think that Metamachy would be even more interesting if Lion is replaced by Centaur (King + Knight) or Musketeer Chess Elephant (King + Alfil + Dabbaba or King + Alibaba). This would give that royal piece somewhat equal power as the Queen and the Eagle.

All Musketeer Chess pieces except for Dragon have power inbetween that of Rook and Queen. The Chancellor is worth slightly less but almost equal in power to that of a Queen and the Archbishop is worth somewhat lesser than a Chancellor and a Queen. I think that Musketeer Chess will also be interesting if the Musketeer Chess fairy piece of Dragon is replaced by the Centaur in version 1.0 and in version 1.2. The power of the Centaur is also inbetween that of a Rook and a Queen. Centaur is 1 of 51 Musketeer Chess pieces under the name of Crowned Knight which is available for play in version 1.5 only against very weak AI or against other human players only offline in same computer and not online at https://musketeerchess.net/site/games. All of these 51 Musketeer Chess pieces are also used under another chess variant named Chexx, in the same website, in a 10×8 board.

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By the way, Shako and Metamachy are very interesting chess variants created by you. There was also a Shako arena tournament in Pychess on 26 August 2021 that I participated for 1½ hours with 3 minutes of starting time and 2 seconds of increment for each move. May be larger boards like 10×10 need more time for moves and it will be implemented later on with Shield tournaments happening for 4 hours every month later on. Metamachy cannot be implemented right now in Pychess because that site is heavily Fairy Stockfish based and Fairy Stockfish cannot support boards larger than 12×10 yet. Right now there are 38 chess variants in Pychess and adding new variants has been suspended to give limited developer time to other features of the website. Besides Lichess and Pychess, Lishogi and Lidraughts use the same interface, plus there is also coverage of more chess variants at Chess.com, Greenchess.net and Vchess.club.

There were lot of interesting exotic chess variants that were available to play at Jocly till 24 October 2018 when that website was shut down due to confiscation of game server by attackers.

It is still possible to play 2 player human games of those exotic chess variants at jocly.jcfrog.com/joclymatch/gamespanel.php without any of those games recorded to the game server or against very weak AI.

Earlier this year, Jocly got open again but it is impossible to connect to game server to review old played human games or to play new human games, let alone play against very weak AI.

Thank you very much for your very interesting comments:

* Wild Tamerlane: I agree that putting pair of colorbound pieces on the same color of squares is awkward. However, the Bishops are on black, Camels and Elephants (which are both weaker than B) are on white. The probability to have a remaining pair of B , or of C or of E, is not different than the probability of having a remaining couple B-E or B-C in my opinion. You seldom keep all pieces until the end, so the configuration where you would like to use 2 B to mate is going to appear more in problems than in real games. Of course, players can always decide to have a non-capturing initial side move for these 3 pieces if they like, but I consider that is a not really a necessary complexification. But I agree it is an interesting point.

* Lion in Metamachy: I disagree that the Lion is stronger than Q and Eagle. On a 12x12 board it is not true. In end games and often by a promotion, it is, I agree, a very strong piece able to mate alone. But I wanted this! For two reasons: 1) it reduces considerably the length of the games, which are always very long in giant chess. It reduces also the chances to draw, which is a good thing. 2) it had some drama in the game as a player in difficulty but with a pawn well advanced can change the fate of the game by promoting and obtain a desperate win. I like this. Finally, I would add that Metamachy has been played a lot already, it has its own book, it is too late to change it. Of course you can invent another game with a less powerful piece.

* Musketeer Chess pieces: without any offense for my friend who is the inventor of this nice chess variant, what is really nice is the concept of piece introduction, which has also been proposed by Mats Winther before. The moves attributed to the pieces are for most of them a strong regret for me (Cannon, Elephant, Spider, Leopard, etc.). They are not natural, sometimes they  are simply absurd, they lack of symmetry and are just geometric patterns. It is quite certain that they have not been play tested a lot. As you pointed out, many are about the same strength. And they are so ignoring the tradition of past chess variants, that in final they are not profiting at all to the chess variants world, adding confusion among the fans. They are some exceptions of course, like the Archbishop or the Chancellor but those are not Musketeer inventions. It doesn't matter. What is left and nice is that anyone can buy these pieces and play as he wants. It is possible that in future an alternative way of playing those pieces will be proposed, more in accordance to chessvariants traditions. I'm working on that and in close discussion with the author/designer of these wonderful pieces.

Thanks for that by the way

I don't know if your comment is sincere or ironic. In the 2nd case, I don't want to promote my variants.

I was glad that someone that I don't know was putting comments on my variants, positive or negative, and I was just answering, explaining the options I had chosen as the inventor. I do not believe, me, that I have invented the next chess of the 21st century and I do believe that there are many excellent chessvariants invented by other people. 

If someone has understood differently my post here, I regret.

I was being very ironic, but the irony was not at all directed towards you.

Chess 960. It should be the default chess game. Even in tournaments. Most everyone is on a level playing field with 960. Raw talent alone wins in 960.

There is no answer to question like this "what is the best chess variant". It depends of course of who is answering. Why one opinion would be better than another one?