Chaos Chess

I was recently watching a load of Wired videos about chess (don't ask me why; I'm not sure myself

Have you heard of Anarchy Chess? It was an event on Reddit in which users were allowed to vote on the next move in a game of chess, legal or not. 

The game started simple with a move which in traditional chess is considered pointless as it offers no tactical advantage, however in this case involved White taking their own pawn.

However, things quickly escalated as Black decided they wanted another Queen, which gave them a huge advantage until White's next move, when they decided that actually, the queen should be theirs. Unfortunately, this means that White has to draw 2 cards.

As you can see, Anarchy Chess got unhinged very quickly. You can see the full progression of the game below:

This post is not about Anarchy Chess. This post is about Chaos Chess.

Chaos Chess is similar to Anarchy Chess in that it's nothing like Anarchy Chess

The main reason that Chaos Chess is on this blog though is that I invented it. Chaos Chess follows more closely the traditional rules of chess as they have existed for roughly 1500 years*. I won't explain those here, but here's a simple explanation of how to play:

*citation needed

Chaos Chess can either alter, remove or add to the traditional rules.

The difference is that these rules always change for every game. I can't even tell you what rules to play. Each player submits possible rules to be selected. These can be one of three types, with examples:

Restrictive Rules 

• Knights can't jump
• Queens can only move a maximum of 2 spaces in any direction

Enhancement Rules

• Rooks can jump (this is a bad rule to implement; it can result in checkmate in one move for Black)
• Pieces can be stacked, so have to be taken twice in order to be fully removed

Chaos Rules

• Each player can at any time choose to play three moves consecutively. This can be implemented at a time of the player's choice
• If a player is in check, they have two moves to get out of check instead of one. 

Each player writes as many of these additional rules as they like (but both players write the same number of rules). The only stipulation with these rules is that no rule can give one player an unfair advantage.

I suggest that each player writes down five rules on separate pieces of paper (yes, this needs to happen in real life) and all ten are mixed together. Before the game starts, some of the rules are drawn from the pile and these are the only additional rules to be enforced.

One problem is that you can occasionally draw rules which contradict each other. 

House Rules!

Like all good board games, Chaos Chess has house rules. Obviously, although I suggested submitting five rules each and only using five, you can do as many as you like (20 rules each submitted but only three used, 100 rules submitted each and only one used, whatever you like).

However, there are other house rules you could implement. I mentioned earlier not having rules that give one player an unfair advantage, but you could change that so each player has one (or more) randomly selected rule that only benefits them. 

You could divide the rules before you start into Restrictive, Enhancement and Chaos Rules so you only have a certain number of each.

You can also have a rule where the additional rules are all swapped partway through the game, for example on the tenth move.

Finally, if you land on the far left corner, you should collect £200. Free Parking may be a House Rule, but there's no reason it should only be limited to one game.