Wild Chess
December 31, 2025
A game my partner and I used to play a ton of over lunch was a game called Really Bad Chess. In Really Bad Chess, each player gets a roughly balanced board of random pieces. Sometimes that means one player gets 5 bishops and another player gets 2 queens and 3 knights. The moves and end goal is the same, checkmate your opponent. This works so nicely because you don't have to memorize openings or gambits, which I was never good at anyhow, because every game is different.
Both my partner and I got used to the rules and craved a little bit more weirdness in our games which is where my project Wild Chess comes in. So one of the things to switch things up even more is adding a second king to defend. This usually has the nice side effect of making games a bit quicker, so we can fit more games in during our lunch break together. It is also a fun challenge as one move can sometimes place both kings into check. But that wasn't enough for us. We also added in a morphing mechanic where if you capture a piece, it morphs into the piece that it just captured. This adds an entirely new dimension to the game where you threaten pieces instead of capturing with your strongest piece as your strong pieces usually get downgraded when they capture. In the same vein it incentivizes lesser pieces to play more offensively with the potential reward they become a better piece by capturing it.
The added layers of complexity add just enough flavor to a game to keep us entertained. If you are at all interested in a twist on a classic, definitely check out Wild Chess