I must confess that I cannot claim to be much of a chessplayer myself. However, I still found the game interesting enough to play a few games from time to time, a few even against human opponents when opportunity presented itself. Also, I have read about the game with interest.
Despite such limited qualifications, I offer several pages to the world of people interested in this game, which may be divided into three categories.
One page contains two comments about the game.
The first notes that the Castling rule might be easier to understand if it were explained in terms of the King moving into check, from the threat of an en passant capture!
The second advocates giving the player who succeeds in forcing stalemate not a full point, but a small fraction of a point above a draw, so that games might be more hard-fought and less likely to end in draws.
The second page includes some chess diagrams. I illustrate a game of chess with a diagram for every move, with comments for each move. Part of the intent is that someone reading the page might learn something about how chess is played.
I chose a game that was fun and exciting, so that reading the page might be entertaining. The Immortal Game, Anderssen-Kieseritzky, 1851.
The third page discusses Dynamic Scoring, a proposal to modify how games of Chess are scored which is inspired by the success of the system of komidashi used in Go in encouraging more aggressive tactical play. This is not to be confused with the method of assessing the impact of government policies on tax revenues which shows that tax cuts for the rich, because they stimulate the economy, should not be expected to decrease government revenues as much as simple arithmetic might indicate.
The first page of this part illustrates a chess variant of my own devising which includes many of the special pieces used by problemists for Fairy Chess, and a version with not quite as many different kinds of men has recently been added.
The second page illustrates another chess variant, using the pieces devised for the preceding one, but on a smaller board, on which a variant is played selected randomly from a list of 45 possibilities. New! A revision has been made, applicable both to the basic version of this variant and to the extended versions which offer more possible arrays, that produces arrays which may be preferred on account of providing the more traditional secured castled position for the King.
The third page discusses three-dimensional chess.
The fourth page looks at another way in which it has sometimes been proposed to improve chess, by making it a slightly more realistic simulation of warfare.
The fifth page illustrates how, inspired by the Chinese Game of the Three Kingdoms, one could have chess for five players.
The sixth page suggests a set of simplified rules for the four-player version of western Chess.
The seventh page illustrates a board for three-player chess that combines two different distortions used to create such a board, giving interesting possibilities, and notes how it can also be used by two, four, or six players.
The eighth page illustrates a modification of Chess that I would have thought would have occured to others, either as a novel game or as a problem theme, many times before, allowing the pieces to play on the points as well as the squres.
The ninth page discusses reducing draws by drawing inspiration from Shogi.
The tenth page discusses an attempt to modify Chess by allowing two moves per turn, but only in the early part of the game, in an attempt to provide an exact balance between White and Black without changing the game too drastically.
The eleventh page takes the idea of expanding the conventional chessboard to a somewhat three-dimensional form, without special equipment other than a chessboard somewhat too large for the chessmen used upon it, as used in Spectral Realm Chess as discussed on the eighth page, and applies it to allowing one to drop captured pieces on the board in Chess as is done in Shogi.
The twelfth page offers a straightforwards enlarged chess variant, in the tradition of such variants as Capablanca Chess, but with a somewhat greater enlargement of the board, to 10 ranks and 12 files, with the intent of packing as much of an increase in complexity of the game as possible into that space.
The first page in this section gives a brief account of several different forms of chess played in different countries.
The second page gives a brief account of a few classic enlarged variants of chess.
The third page discusses Warring States Chess, a Chinese game for seven players.
The fourth page discusses the Game of the Three Kingdoms, a version of Chinese Chess for three players.
The first page contains a discussion of forms of chess played on a board made of hexagons.
The second page continues that discussion for boards with the hexagons pointed the other way (that is, with their pointy ends pointing up and down).
The first page in this section contains an attempt on my part to reconstruct the rules of Waider's version of Chess for three players.
The second page deals with many of the older and simpler attempts to construct a new, enlarged version of Chess by adding a few pieces with new moves.