Introduction

 

Implementation of some chess variants for Zillions-of-Games can require only writing a few lines of code. You just need to make a copy of Chess.zrf from Zillions-of-Games installation and slightly modify it. Here is a nice example I found in German magazine Computer Schach und Spiele, Idiot chess:

 

 

This implement a chess variant, where white moves, then black moves and then "idiot" player randomly moves one white and one black piece.

It makes fun to make such changes to chess rules and try out new chess variants with Zillions-of-Games.

 

Different goal

 

The goal in standard chess is to checkmate the king of the opponent:

 

 

This goal can be easily modified to something different. After I saw the game Breakthrough by W. Troyka, I created the following chess variant, Breakthrough chess. I just replaced above line in Chess.zrf with:

 

 

I.e. instead of checkmate, the goal now is to reach "promotion zone", 8th rank for white and 1st rank for black. This game is fun to play at least for a half hour. After you are done just open Zillions Language Reference (file Langref.chm in Zillions installation) and search for word goal. Now you are ready to invent hundreds of chess variants in a few minutes. Just see examples and adapt to something interesting. For example it makes sense to try out several variations of Centric chess, like:

 

 

The player, who first occupies positions e4 and d5 or positions e5 and d4 at the same time, wins. Some variants will be certainly quickly played out. For example Checkmate pawn chess:

 

 

My first game against Zillions finished with a disaster: 1. e4?? Nf6 2. e5 Nc6 and white e-pawn is checkmated. However, I took revenge in the second game: 1. e3! Nf6 2. Bc4 Nd5 3. Bxd5, checkmate.