As can be discerned by visiting the Chess Variants website, there are a bunch of different chess variants out there. One person pointed out that anybody who is interested in doing so can come up with their own variant on chess in less than one hour. So, if one is to come up with a chess variant that may be mildly stimulating to players, what is one to do?

Obviously  there are many answers to that question. If one is going to try to come up with a large "workable" variant on the game,  I have some strong thoughts on some issues that need to be aired if the game is to come close to resembling chess: 

Pawns and Pawn Strucutres in large variants:

"Many are the strange chances of the world, and help oft shall come from the hands of the weak when the Wise falter." Gandalf the Grey, as written by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Silmarillion. 

"Pawns are the soul of chess," said legendary 18th century French player, Francois Philidor. Every chess player knows of the importance of pawns and pawn play. Pawns, and their resulting structures that they form across the board, become the "terrain" over which the game is fought and played. It is how players move their pawns that determine whether combat will be closed and locked, or open and wide ranging. Furthermore, pieces may be traded off which can result in doubled up (or even tripled up) pawns, pawn sacrifices, isolated pawns, backward pawns, further defining the role of pawns and pawn structures on the game. 

This issue comes to fore when you try to create a 10 x 10 square chess variant. In normal chess, the enclosed 8 x 8 square board, coupled with the en passant move, creates plently of situations where those lowly pawns often end up playing a major role in the outcome of the game. In my view, any would be large variant has to be created where pawns retain their traditional role in play.

Large variants that are 8 x 10 squares in size (by which I mean the board is 8 ranks deep by 10 files wide), such as Capablanca Chess, have an inherent advantage over 10 x 10 (or larger) sized variants in preserving traditional pawn play. This is obvious. The only difference in strategy from the perspective of pawn play is that the board is two files wider, but that makes no difference in terms of likely developments in pawn play or in the resulting pawn structures that occur as the game proceeds. In such variants, one can envision doubled up pawns, pawn chains, isolated pawns that are candidates for attack, pawns that act as posts for knights, and that chase away more powerful pieces away. All of these developments can result from normal play on an 8 x 10 board. 

Making pawn play interesting and issue worthy becomes a much more complicated task in 10 x 10 (or larger) chess variants. If a would be game inventor simply lines up 20 pieces on a 10 x 10 board, with the pawns lined up on the second rank on each side of the board a - la normal chess, the game inventor will eventually realize that there is a great deal of space on the board that is not occupied.

So why does the fact that there is a lot of space on the board at the beginning of the game matter so much? The reason is that it is less likely that either player's pieces will come into direct contact with each other. There simply is no reason to. If they do not come into contact with each other, it is less likely that rich positional situations will develop. The issue extends beyond pawn play and into the wider game, but to reiterate the matter, pawns are often what develop the positions and terrain on the board. Originally, I thought that having pawns move three squares forward on their first moves would solve this problem. However, just because a pawn can move three squares forward does not result in exciting play in of itself. It will not necessarily result in the formation of pawn chains, in doubled (or tripled up) pawns, and so on which help define board positions. It took considerable play testing for me to come to this conclusion.

So, what is a would be chess variant inventor to do? In my view, any chess variant has to recreate and reincorporate the challenges of pawn play into the variant. The best solution to pawns and pawn play has, in my view, come from Dutch game designer Christian Freeling, who invented Grand Chess. In Grand Chess, Freeling aligns his initial board setup where each player's pawns are on the third rank on the board. By doing this, Freeling recreates the inherent tension found in classical chess by lining up the pawns so that they are only separated by 4 ranks, just as they are in normal chess. Pawns can start defining the board position (and clash) right away.

However, I wasn't entirely satisfied with this answer to the problem of pawn play. How could one design a large chess variant where the pieces line up on the back rank, yet have pawn structures that matter? It was asking this question that led me to design the opening initial board setup that I created in Magi. By putting a pair of pawns on the third rank, one can potentially create tense pawn positions by building them into the starting position itself. By incorporating doubled up pawns (on the D and G files) in the initial board setup, pawn structures can be created in the middle of the board which begin to resemble those found in normal chess and play can be affected in similar ways.

Page 4 discusses Magi's new pieces and new possible strategies for play.