Another nice variant of Chess is Atomic Chess. The rules are simple:
- When a piece captures another, all pieces directly adjacent to that piece (excluding pawns) are also captured, alongside the capturing piece. This makes rooks, bishops, and knights even more deadly.
- You can win by checkmate or by blowing up the enemy king.
A couple notes on the effects of this:
-Kings can't capture, as doing so would blow themselves up.
-You cannot capture enemy pieces adjacent to your king, as doing so would blow the king up.
-Moving to a spot that could be blown up (as in, adjacent to a friendly piece that the enemy can capture) will not lead to check, but will probably lead to your king getting blown up.
-If your king is in check, it is your turn, and the next move you make will blow up the enemy king, then you can make that move. In short, if you can get the enemy king first, check doesn't apply.
If you have already signed up to chess.com, you can play Atomic here. I suggest a 3 minute time control, or 3|2. This makes the games feel much more compact, and they don't last much longer than that.
Helpful tips:
Knights are almost exclusively used to open a game. Usually playing towards the center, a good example is Nf3. Now, if black doesn't play to block any of these moves, white could go Ne5 and then nothing can be done by black but have their king blown up, as they are targeting 2 pieces adjacent to the king. A good counter to that is to move your pawn that is on the same file as the knight forward one square. This blocks the knight from moving forward, and oftentimes makes your opponent seek a different method entirely.
Also, NEVER LEAVE YOUR QUEEN OR A PIECE IN FRONT OF YOUR QUEEN OPEN TO AN ATTACK. This is easy to accidentally do, and will almost definitely result in your king fucking dying.
I'll get some more example games as I play on chess.com and post them here. It's my personal site, hosted by github, and has what's called a PGN viewer, which will let you replay the chess games. If it's not up yet, let me know.
Also, I remember seeing an article complaining about how hard it was to use tables to make a chessboard to better illustrate chess-related things here on E2. This is probably your answer.
Writeup on how to host your own website at github.io coming soon maybe, and how to embed the PGN viewer, if people want me to make it.