And idea for new variant

My friends and I came up with this idea for a new variant which we think will introduce quite some new (to chess) concepts to the game of chess.

Here are the ideas for the rules:
1. Pieces move like they do in normal chess (exceptions below).
2. The goal of the game is to capture opponent's king. This also means there is no stalemate.
3. *OFFSIDE*: If you move your piece behind all enemy pieces by rank, meaning that if black has all pieces on ranks 2-6 and you move your piece on rank 7 or 8, black has *A FREE KICK*. Intuitively white gets a free kick if he has all pieces on ranks 3-7 and black moves a piece on rank 1 or 2.
4. *FOUL*: Capturing a pawn gives the opponent a free kick.
5. *FREE KICK*: Player that has free kick can in the next move put any of his pieces (except pawns, including king) to any square on the board, that is currently not occupied by any piece. He can also put the piece into offside but this will result in the opponent having a free kick. The player with free kick can obviously play regular move (including the one with pawns and captures). Idea: might also be interesting to be forced to make a free kick, meaning captures and pawn moves are not allowed.
5. *HALFTIME*: When one player spends half of his starting time the board gets reflected by vertical axis between file D and E, meaning all pieces previously on file A now move to file H, all pieces on file B are then on file G, etc. The position is still the same, just in the other direction. Why this, because it seems fun and might result in some bad premoves.

Why I think this would be fun?
1. It introduces well-known concepts of football into a completely different game of chess.
2. By capturing a pawn for mate will not actually result in mate because the "mated" player has a free king and can move his king outside check.
3. You actually get to capture the king and not just check it.
4. Premoving might get you in trouble if you premove and the opponent gave you a check because he can now capture your king. Note: maybe leave that out and stick with mate because that could be quite frustrating (but so is in Dark Chess ;)).

These are just some ideas for this new variant, everyone is invited to leave the comment on what he or she thinks, some new ideas, comments on current ideas, everything.

@liminal Here it is :). Also tag other people interested in new variants please because I don't know them, I am a freshman here.

@thibault @toadofsky

Futbal Chess. I fundamentally like the concept of bringing in sports strategy to Chess, and the use of the terminology would certainly help some people familiar with those terms.

US players would be at a distinct disadvantage, because Futbal is not as popular there and the terminology would be meaningless to them.

A few questions:
• Free Kick, does that include captured pieces or only pieces on the board?
• Halftime doesn't result in massive offsides? You should clarify this a bit.

I don't know about the halftime, overall idea is somewhat nice for online chess.

Something like that, yes, although I haven't come up with a good idea for a name.

Yes, I do agree about that, in USA the term "football" stands for what is in the rest of the world known as "American football".

* I see now that I missed it. Only pieces currently on board were meant to be moved to another square. I don't quite like the idea of allowing captured pieces to be moved back to board in this variant.
* No, it doesn't. I don't see how it could. If a piece is on rank 7, it will stay on rank 7, just the file would change. Speaking of this, we came up with another idea, described in next paragraph.

NEW IDEA: Instead of half-time being when first player reaches half of his time and reflecting the board around y-axis, maybe a more interesting idea, and more close to actually what happens at half-time in football, would be, that when the SECOND player reaches the half of his time (meaning that both players have gone under half of their time), the board gets reflected around x-axis - or if you like it more this way: white player get's black pieces and black player gets white's pieces.

Why this?
* If it was the half-time as described here when first player reaches half of his time, one could sac everything (or even prepare a position when he would get mated by force in few moves) and then wait for his time to drop to half and he would clearly have the win.
* It would introduce even more unconventionalities: One could try to win the opponent before both players run under half their time, but if he fails to do so, the opponent will get the position from which the first player failed to win and he will get a chance to win that position.
* By half-time at both players dropping below half their time, the players would try to fight for a position that would either guarantee them a win in the half of given time, or to try to sac everything before half-time (kind of when both you and your opponent are a second from flagging and you start sacing pieces just to give check and take time).

I think the strongest rules change you have here is the "Freekick" rule. It's like an interesting, lighter touch on BugHouse. You only really need this one rule to make a fairly cool variant.

The other rules are complicated and don't, IMHO, add much.

You also have a very interesting concept here in your additional post that would make a very cool internet variant all on it's own. That's switching colors at pre-determined time controls.

For example, what if you started as White, but at half way through the game you switched sides. In this case I would use the TOTAL time left (combined time) to figure out the flip points.

Or it would be cool to set up a button you could press to switch colors, but it cost you time.

I always thought it would be cool if after a certain time your back rank disappeared and all the pieces still on it, Then your 2nd/7th rank etc etc forcing all pieces including the Kings into a mass battle to the death in the centre.

@liminal That sounds really interesting (about only switching sides). I don't like the idea of pressing a button to switch sides because it would be too OP I think (or it would not in result in anything because the player with better position would not want to change sides and when his opponent would change sides, he would just change it right back). I think the best would be to change sides once or twice in a game, at set time controls.

@NeverBeenTimid That also sounds really interesting. I although wouldn't "delete" the rank, just the pieces on it and disallow moving back to that rank (out of aesthetic and practical reasons). Also maybe color those ranks with gray color or something, like in Dark Chess so it is obvious you cannot move there.

@Makedonium Agreed. I'm brainstorming here, so the ideas are fresh and untested. I like the idea that you need to keep things fairly balanced because you may be playing the opposite side soon.

I have a variant called "Chess 4.5" where one player makes 4.5 moves. (5 White and 4 Black moves) and the opposing player then gets to pick color and the the player who was Black makes the next move.

What happens is that opening book tends to be less important because you are now in the middle of most openings.

Having a switch happen during the game based on time control is a good idea, but there's the Bughouse flaw, where a player sets himself up in a position to lose (in Bughouse this is by sacrificing pieces to feed his partner materials) and then waits on time. I would fear that optimal strategy would be finding a way to put yourself in a really bad position, perhaps a move or two from checkmate and then stalling until the game flipped.

You'd need a mechanism to keep that from happening because it's bloody frustrating to be the guy waiting.

@liminal That is why the half-time would be when both players reach half of their time, not when the first player reaches it. This way, if both players have more than half, one cannot start sacrificing because the other player might checkmate him before the sides switch. And if you have less than half of the time and opponent gets close to half as well you have to consider whether sacrifice is ok or the opponent will checkmate you before the sides switch. Kind of like in ultrabullet, you need to decide when and if it is the right time to sac.

@Makedonium No, you just moved the strategy to being the second one to go past half time.

So the player that plays safe in the first half of his opponent's time can then go crazy with the time left until the half of his time, creating the same scenario.

Example: Black plays a closed position for his first half of time, making certain he makes safe, meaningless moves that require little thinking time so that he is ahead on time when his opponent reaches the halfway mark.
Now he switches tactics and with his time remaining until the half plays with reckless abandon, with horrible sacrifices, positional weakness and checking the opposing King... time flips and the tables turn.