Take a chess board. Add portals. Now you have Portal Chess. The concept is fairly straightforward. Each side has their own portal, which they can move one step in any direction.
Going through a portal means your piece’s particular style of movement continues through your opponent’s portal. There are a couple of other details and rules, so you should watch the full video for them.
Definitely going to try playing this one with my dad. Since, you know, I beat him that one time. And I may very well do so again.
How to play Portal Chess! [YouTube via Reddit]
There are literally hundreds and hundreds of different variants of chess out there. 'Bughouse' has always probably been my favorite, even though I'm crap at it (google it, it's a riot).
This one is unique and creative, sounds like fun :)
It's very detailed.
As a chess buff? This is terrible.
Mind explaining why? Be curious to hear why a chess buff thinks it's bad.
In my opinion, it pretty much stops it being chess.
Fairly basic use of portals would be able to nullify the threat of most pieces, or potentially make them game breaking.
If you're running two rooks, a rook and a queen, or let's say two queens, you can get so much threat coverage on the board by placing them strategically around your portal entry that at any point after the first ten moves you're likely to dominate the board and force checkmate.
Essentially, chess has been balanced over many years and it's a fairly "fair" game. This portal system makes it very random and OP, I guess you could say.
That said, yes, chess can get boring if you're running at top tier. But if it's boring, play a different game.
For example: this same system, but done with checkers? Much more balanced.
As a chess buff I think it's brilliant and I'd love to see it implemented online, like bughouse and Fischer random. The problem with competitive chess now is that openings have ben exhaustively analyzed so many moves into the game and much of the game can be determined by which player has better memorized opening lines, long before puzzle-solving and positional sense can get involved. The portal "twist" returns chess to a pristine state without centuries of opening analysis, but it's still more analyzeable and less random than bughouse and Fischer Random are.