Show HN: I made a chess variant focused on cheat resistance and creative play

3 weeks ago 1

Season 1 - The Pawn Sovereign

Checkmate your opponent's last standing pawn, and you win!
If you promote your last remaining pawn, you win!
Move the same pawn forward on three consecutive turns while all Queens and Kings are still on the board, and you win!
Before play starts, flip three cards face up. Those cards are rules that affect both players.

It's our favorite game, just no longer plagued by computer-assisted cheating. Hopefully you'll find this variant fun, with an emphasis on creativity vs. memorization. New rules will be added here in new "seasons" if any engine is competing well at the game.

Competitive play: Make sure that the three rules being added are random chosen.

Each card's name starts with a unique letter, which is handy for chess notation.

About the Creator

I'm a chess kid at heart! I grew up in chess clubs, going to local tournaments, and playing with my dad from the ripe age of 4. A top childhood highlight was getting "Attacking Chess" signed by Josh Waitzkin in the convention center at the first ever SuperNationals in Knoxville in 1997. (That one became the pristine copy, and I got another to read.) I've never competed well at the game, but it kept on giving: When I moved to Austin in an especially introverted phase, meeting up at a four-handed-chess club helped me break out of my shell.

I started prototyping Argon Chess in 2023, but I felt like the project would benefit from waiting to release. In the intervening time, I've realized that, as with other (and upcoming) projects, my overarching goal is to connect people with deep creativity, and, recently, to give us a break from the superficial AI "creativity" that inundates us. I think this approach to chess encourages creative play.

This is a pure passion project at this point. No money's been raised for it, though some has been spent on it. In the future, I would love to commission some custom artwork.

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