Why not capture the King?

Except those other changes were progressive.

I've never heard that rule before. The game always ended when one side was checkmated.

Yeah, anytime I ever played bughouse only one king needed to be checkmated.

according wikipedia article one variation allows kings to be captured

"Kings can be captured and the game continues until one team has all kings on the board"

That makes for a very long game. Sacrifices could become detrimental in the long run.

There is a particular word to describe those who think NOW is the logical culmination of all Human existence, up to this point. Several words probably, but they're just beyond my grasp: low blood suger(for me)perhaps...

"Why not capture the king?"

For what? What is the propose? Win the game? OK, capture the king's opponent after his resign if that makes you happy.

Better to imprision an enemy King, then ransom him back to his homeland. That way, the opposition get back a "losing King" (rather than a new, maybe better and more successful, King) and they are all the poorer for your gift.

If people want to go and play a chess variant where there is no check and Kings can be captured, then that's perfectly fine, you can go and do that. Most people wouldn't really call that chess though. It might be called "Chess 2: The King is a Fighting Piece", if you were to give it a movie-like title. Or perhaps it could be called chess, and what is now normal chess could be called "Chess 2: The Stalemate Strikes Back".

My point is that it really doesn't matter. If you want to go and play a game which is just like chess, but a little bit different, there are plenty of variations, and the beauty of a game like chess is that you can bring in new rules yourself. But please don't try to shove it on other people who are perfectly happy with the current game, and say "this is better because X, Y, Z." It's all subjective, and other people are perfectly well entitled to their own opinions and their own choices on what they want to play.

If you want to be a total purist about it, you should play the real game of chess where there is no queen, no castling, no two-space initial pawn move, no en passant captures, etc. Every change to the game that's ever been adopted was, at one time, deemed a dubious variant that serious chess players would never go near. Now, I'm not saying that actually capturing the king and allowing checks to be ignored would necessarily improve the game. What I am saying is that chess is not a game whose rules are carved in stone, and that history has consistenly made fools out of those who believe the game is already perfect and who feel that variants should just remain variants. Such close mindedness is not the attractive (or commendable) virtue many of you seem to think it is.

King cannot be captured because of historical reasons: in the ancient wars the enemy army would not spill the defeated king's blood (a convention decided by kings themselves). Chess takes this historical fact to the game. It also underlines the importance of, you know, the piece the whole game revolves around.

Chess if perfect. Wanting to change things just for the heck of it is only a childish behaviour of people trying to get attention.

That makes perfect sense!!

lol.

Well before you start thinking about en passant, castling, pints, etc. you may want to realize it's a board game whose rules create a game with complex and interesting  strategy/tactics... nothing more.  Chess was never meant to simulate anything.

We Europeans know our Kings from our cabbages.

A very difficult distinction! At least we replace our cabbages every eight years or so.

Kings reside in the northern-hemisphere. Vegetables grow anywhere.