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> 22. Pieces belong to a player.

Good point. It did not occur to me to mention this, but for me it carries as least as much weight as any other of the characteristics I mentioned.

OTOH, I would not put any weight on things like 'pieces should move like Chess pieces' or 'Can be played with Chess board and pieces'. This seems to single out a specific variant (namely Mad Queen) as overwhelmingly more important than the others. While IMO it is just one of the many Chess variant, and not even the most popular one on the planet.

Furthermore, a point system should take into account that the characteristics are not just boolean all-or-nothing things. For my perception of Chess-likeness it definitely matters if the rules are mildly violated (e.p. capture and castling in Mad Queen), or badly violated (e.g. almost no piece captures by replacement, as in Ultima). So the question is more if the typical behavior satisfies the requirements, rather than that no exception at all is tolerated.

The concept of 'recognized variant', in the sense of very widely played, should probably play some rule too. For instance, if a game is on the edge w.r.t. the number and severity of how it violates the defining characteristics, it should never be pushed over the edge based on whether it also allows e.p. capture or not. This particular transgression of the replacement-capture requirement should be designated 'acceptable' because it is so common (which no doubt can be traced back to the popularity of the recognized variant that incorporates it.)

There also seems to be need to weight the opposite: likeness to very popular games recognized to be not Chess variants. If Checkers would be recognized as an independent game, (which I think the vast majority of people would agree on), I would be inclined to reject games that are more like Checkers than like Chess, even if in an objective measure they are closer to Chess than some other variants which do not happen to be close to any other recognized game either.