"Take Your Own Pieces" chess variant

Again - smother mates are pretty rare in games anyway.

Someone suggested this would lead to lots of draw by insufficient material. I really don't see why that is. It's not like players will just be taking their own pieces willy-nilly until they have none left. Taking your own pieces will typically hurt your position more than it helps.

Smothered mates are eliminated, but at least you're winning material if you force the opponent to capture his own piece.

Not just smothered mates are eliminated, but it becomes harder to trap a piece. For example, sometimes you can trap the opponent's queen because some escape routes are blocked by their own pieces. In this variation, the queen could escape by taking a less valuable piece or pawn. Still an advantage to the attacking player, just less of one.

You may want to exempt the king altogether -- no taking your own king and/or the king can't take his own pieces.

It would be cool if say, you had 20 points give or take and then you would select you pieces. That would be a nice way to play. You could choose a Queen, 2 pawns, 2 bishops, and a knight.

Loomis - I appreciate your comments (more constructive than a lot of previous replies, e.g. "I don't agree with this." from djpatel7487).

I agree that the issue of not being able to trap pieces is balanced out somewhat by the fact that trapping forces the opponent to give up material. I don't think this should be underestimated (when is it bad to gain material?).

I also like your idea that only certain pieces can take their own. The king not being able to take his own seems to make sense (and deals with the problem I identified in my initial example).

Perhaps a piece can only take an "ally" of its own value or greater (thereby eliminating the ability of kings and queens to capture allies) ... or pieces can only capture allies that are, say, no less than 4 points their own value.

This is a current 960 game i'm in so no help please. Rxa2 would win black's queen for a rook and a pawn, darn geneva convention.

It would certainly increase the number of available positional pawn sacs.  Especially in closed games where the minor pieces can become inactive, an easy way to break through would be through your own pawns.  Because of this I suspect games would become less positional or at least when closed wouldn't involve nearly as much maneuvering.

Bad bishops wouldn't be nearly as much of a problem in endgames.

Many mates and matting attacks involve using the opponent's pieces to help corner the king.  But like was said already, you could just have it so the king couldn't capture this way.

I still think this is a rather promising looking variation. And I still I haven't come accross it anywhere else...

There are entire books on chess variant games maybe this idea is in one of them.

I don't know what all the hullabaloo is about people "wanting to change the game (of chess)" just because someone wants to play a non-standard variation of the game. Isn't it possible some people just want to play Losing Chess, 960, Kriegspiel etc without "wanting to change the game of chess?" Maybe they like some other form of the game instead once in awhile - or all the while, who cares anyway?

Imho, this ism a very interesting variant and one that makes sense. Itnoccurs to me whenever my queen or king is about to be trapped, which means that this occurs to me often. In a historical sense this make sense as many battlefield commanders have sent many soldiers to their deaths in battles of attrition, see Verdun. I have not been able to get anyone to bite and play such a variatn, but i often play on line. As for chess being perfect and invioluble, my understanding is that the game changed many many times as it developed over the centuries, no harm in using our imagination a little, peace

Is there a variant of chess in which you can take your own pieces?

I'm not talking about a Suicide/Giveaway Chess variant, I'm talking about normal chess rules in which you are trying to win with your own pieces, but with the added bonus that you can also take your own pieces if you think it might help. See example below:

EDIT: I've just realized my example is rather flawed because of course the Black king can escape checkmate by taking one of his own pawns! But it still gives the general idea ...

They're not changing it, they're proposing a variant.

In this example, white loses due to the extra rule:

I agree. This will make the game more interesting, and altogether kill the importance of theory and momerising, although for only some period, but eventually decreasing it by some extent, in the long term.

Also, I will like to suggest three more variations based on Indian version of the game, which, I think will hugely benefit the game:-

1). Pawn Promotion- A pawn is promoted to the same piece, whose location it reached at the other end. If its the King's location, it should be promoted to Queen. This will surely make the game more interesting.

2). Castlilng - Instead of this, a King should be allowed to make a Queen's or Knight's move, just once in the game. This too will make the game more interesting and introduce huge variations in the game.

3). Exchange of the King's and Queen's position for the Black at the starting - This will, to some extent, offset the traditional advantage White has been having.

http://www.chessvariants.com/difftaking.dir/selfeliminator.html

"All rules of orthodox chess apply, with this modification: players may also take their own pieces."

This variant would be interesting if only king was allowed to take his own pawns and pieces. Regrettably it happens in real life... even though applying this rule would mean that in some circumstances king would be forced to take his own soldiers in order to save his ass which would make this beautiful game rather gloomy...

Maybe "take" your own pieces with your pieces or just remove them from the board-like with the fingers-sounds workable

I think you'd have to be pretty careful-like -you'd probably never want to remove a pawn-

cool out of the box idea-

Chess.com should add this. Would be a great addition to the variants.