Hey Sam, you said: '[I]f you want your variant in this tournament, you need to figure out how to program game courier to play the variant.' Lol, you're safe from my games, then. I'm lucky I can make basic, non-rules-checking presets. :)

Vitya - oops! Wondered about that. Anyhow, I thought Jose proposed Modern Chess a while ago.

Finally, Mats, for what it's worth, HyperModern Shatranj may not have been played as such yet at all. I honestly don't remember. So you may technically get your wish if it's played in the tourney. However, as George has just commented on another thread, it's more of a shuffling in and out of pieces and a rearrangement of the rules than an actual variant. The only reason I actually posted it as a separate game is that people kept coming up with it and saying 'put it in the shatranj games', so I did. And someone else posted a very similar game a week later. You'll see 4 names in my write-up.

George is very right about the minor fudging of pieces and/or places in the initial setup not being actual variants. They are 'merely' games, many quite good, of a variant or variant class. Of course, a good game is never 'mere', but changing one thing doesn't make for a new variant necessarily. A number of my games feature alternate piece sets, and some prefer different versions. HG Muller uses the DWAF instead of the WF as the default Great Shatranj game in his software. Christine Bagley-Jones did Capablanca Shatranj, which uses some long range pieces. 

Maybe it comes down to knowing how the game will play by reading the rules [because you've played so many similar games] before you ever need to push pieces. That's why they're called modest variants - they are close enough to the well-known that the quality of the game can be evaluated reasonably well without actually playing it.