Friendly fire (taking own pieces)

What do you think about allowing it (optionally, of course) for clearance (destroying obstructions)?

Sometimes it may be funny to force one to minimize material loss in such a way.

You'd loose a lot of tacical patterns based upon getting your enemy's pieces in each other's way. Think of smothered mate.

You could consider to allow this only within limitations - say only a certain piece can capture or be captured by a friendly piece.

I have made some variants that allow you to capture your own pieces with some limitations. One is that knights are allowed to capture their own pieces and if they do, they are allowed to move again during the same turn. The idea then becomes to create crazy tactics where you sacrifice your own pieces.

Another is that one of your pawns are an enemy spy (opponent chooses one, you do not know which one). You are allowed to capture your own pawns in an attempt to get rid off the spy. A player can during their turn reveal which pawn was his spy and the spy will change color to his army. However the pawn switching sides this was consumes a turn. A player does not need to reveal which pawn was his spy if his opponent captures his own pawn, so there are some mind games there. Of course being able to capture your own pawns can have more implications, such as escaping a back rank mate.

Limitations lead to complications and complications lead to losing potential of mass playability and interest.

Of course, smothered mate and traps etc. would be not possible to complete but such patterns will not entirely gone, because they will lead to winning some material. On the other hand some unusual tactical patterns may emerge, like unexpected open attacks from behind of pawn chain etc.

I suppose in general such option will not make tacrics poorer but different. And of course it's not proposed as substitution to classical chess but as supplement.

imo, variants that change too little is not very interesting and variants that change too much is too intimidating. I tend to try to find a middle-ground. For me allowing to capture your own pieces is too little added complexity and play too much like classical chess. Of course how many changes are too little or too much are different for different people.

Intresting idea, but it needs to be worked out to make it playable.

Martin0

Yes, this is what art of balance about: as much extra fun/diversity as possible traded for as less intimidation/intimity as possible.

Ashvapathi

By test?)


Btw, there is also an option to allow friendly fire for one side only (for instance, for black, since dark side doesn't care so much about health of own units)). It would be interesting to look how this would affect the balance of powers and what engines would say.