Many great chess players, and although I am not a great chess player I echo this opinion, feel chess is very stale.

The game has essentially come down to simply reading the opening moves of your opponent and responding with the proper predetermined response to lead to the desired end game.

Most pro chess comes down to, in effect, the memorization of recognition of pre-defined plans as opposed to any strategy, inovation, insight or psycology.

To that end varient forms of chess (often called Fairy Chess [en.wikipedia.org]) have formed involving new new pieces, larger boards and/or random placement of pieces onto the board.

Personally I feel this is much needed. The version of chess we most commonly play today is not the original or even universal form of the game. The version of chess we play to day is a version sometimes called Mad Queen Chess since introduced the vastly more powerful and game changing Queen piece. (Thank you wikipedia for verifing those hazily remembered facts.) It seem to me natural that games can and should change over time.

While I, being a rank amature and only playing similarly extreamly casual players, don't run into the problem of playing opponents with who have memorized the game I have seen the game played this way and I hate it. I'm the sort of player who plays not only with the pieces but with my opponent's mind. Misdirection, distraction, and mind games are my formost weapon's in chess. I think that is an important part of the game lost in higher games and the reason I don't enjoy playing against the computer. After all against a computer the best you should be able to get is a draw if it was programed decently.

To my mind any game that can't end with the possiblity of both winning and losing in addition to drawing isn't very enjoyable.

Of course since I don't play chess much and it really to much of a bother to play farie chess most of those times as that requires finding people willing to go through the bother of learning alternate rules it is rather an academic point. However if I saw one for sale I would certainly buy one and I think I would enjoy seeing a match played. I suppose what I am getting at here is I like the idea of chess evolving within reason and I'm currious to get other people's opinions.

I had no idea that chess had gotten memorizable.

It's probably a good idea what you said though.

I don't have any "Moves" that everyone knows and such. I just play the game, thinking as I go. But this would be fun, if I saw it somewhere.

Well what I mean is that their are a very finite number of good opening moves and successful end games. Pro-Chess players can easily memorize all these and recognize them. After that it often simply becomes mechanically responding with the correct counter game.

This is why computers tend to be really good a chess, but not nearly as good at games like Risk.

They have some really interesting and wierd pieces in some varients of the game. Like for example there are some jumper pieces that can only move if they can hope over another piece to start off their move. I haven't played with that one myself but I can imagine how that would change the game since you would now have more important work for your pawns then just trying to shuffle across the boards and pick up other pawns.

If you're going to play wild variants of Chess that are no longer Chess, you might as well pick up the Starcraft boardgame and play that!

Well I did ask for opinions but that doesn't make much sense to me.

Many forms of chess existed before Mad Queen Chess and still do in other parts of the world.

I'm currious do you feel for example Risk & Risk Godstorm are not the same game then?

I'm just saying that for a competitive game like Chess, its variants are kinda like game enhancement mods for Starcraft... fun mods that the competitive players (and their fanboys) would never touch.

And Starcraft is only a 10 yr old videogame. And look how much resistance there is to making SC2 a different game. Instead, Blizzard is basically making a 3D SC1 and calling it SC2.

How old is Mad Queen Chess? This standard version will never be replaced in "serious" Chess.

lol! What about the Bobby Fischer variant? lol!
They randomise the arrangement of the pieces behind the pawns apparently. I laughed at first but it actually sounds like a good idea, nice and easy to implement and no new rules to adapt to- but it totally messes up all memorised plays because those are totally contingent on the standard layout.

As to Mlai's contention... Well Chess never stops changing. The official game has had a lot of official changes. The oldest versions of the game were very different to what we have now. All sorts of thing have changed... Pawns jumping one or two squares at the start, Castling, "En passant" and movement variations for other pieces.

So speculation about another change becoming official isn't al that far-fetched.

Bobby Fischer or random chess is actually a lot of fun, though I can never remember how castling works in that version. X_X