castle-less chess

Here is castling banned.

would it be better to promote the hpawn into a queen?

I don't get that move

see my threads last week on pawn promotion.

Is there anything more to this variant other than ommitting the Castles?

It seems that so little of regular chess has actually changed here, this it isn't so much a variant as its merely a muddying of the good and neat order of Chess.

What's the point of not having Rooks? Why shouldn't we play with them?

As Pritchard remarks in the preface to his book on Chess variants: "It only takes about 10 seconds to invent a new Chess variant, and unfortunately some people do!"

ok, I Do see that... well it makes more sense then. Gj.

The rules of chess in 1560 were that you can do "free castling" by moving your rook to f1 (As usual) and your king to h1 (not g1 as is done today).

I wonder if Pritchard describes what would constitute a chess variant. Surely, playing FIDE Chess without En Pessant is an official variant??

I don't know if there is anything like an 'official variant', unless we mean by it "variants that are played in organized form by large numbers of people", such as FIDE Chess, Xiangqi or Shogi. In principle any difference in the rules would make it a different variant, although I would personally make an exception for rules pertaining to the initial setup. (And especially if the alterative start position is in the game tree of the conventional opening position.) But there are people that insist Chess960 is an independent variant, rather than just normal Chess from a different position (i.e. a 'thematic tournament'). I don't know Pritchard's position on this. I sometimes refer to these alternate setups as 'sub-variants'. E.g. in 10x8 Capablanca Chess there are many different initial starting positions in common use (Gothic, Capablanca, Carrera, Embassy).

The game presented here seems to be just normal Chess: this position is in the game tree of FIDE Chess.

This is my exact point: so where would Prichard draw the line as to when a game is a variant versus a varied setup?

I suppose we humans like to categorize things for the sake of convenience, even though it can't always be neatly so. A star can sometimes constitue a planet, and a Moon with a Planet can sometimes constitue a binary Planetary system. Classifying a celestial body isn't always clear-cut, as analogous to Chess, I guess.