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Hi Kevin,

I am not that sure that your perceived failure of an nextchess idea is totally justified.

Your argument about the grandfather-grandson game is definitely correct. More over as you have said before (in different words I cannot recall exactly), it is difficult to make a game as perfectly done as the "Mad Queen" variant ended up being :)! This is why I had argued for (may I shall now name it) the many nextchess hypothesis. Together they may prove to become even more popular then it's predecessors, but separately indeed one game will never be as dominant. That makes sense mostly because of the different paths next chess can take. Let's think about 10x10 games which seem the most convenient. I'd vote for Grand Chess, Omega Chess, Eurasian Chess and Shako although I have some quarrels with the first 2 (and technically omega chess in not exactly an 10x10 game). Each has it's beauty although I won't go into details here. Further even, Gross Chess offers a melding of them. A very well made game. Another path is Chess with different armies. Betza's one is definitely the most popular one but certainly Spartan chess deserves it fair share of respect. For multi move or at least interesting 8x8 ideas (again technically not 8x8), I really want to mention 8 stones chess. Musketeer chess has it's merits also, although I'm not that happy with the execution. Maybe just an 9x8 board would be an improvement as to me the game seems way to crowded. The pieces are quite creatively done. Although no griffin?!.. Come on :(! There are also drop games in the shogi family. Pocked shogi copper seems quite promising, and here maybe is fair to mention chu shogi with it's special Lyon piece (and oh boy,oh boy that tenjiku stuff). Xianqi offer special  things with it's confined king and weaker armies and the more rarely used hopper pieces. I think this fills everybody's hands with next chess opportunities. And in closing I'd like to add my (I'd like to say humble but I'm actually quite proud of them) apothecary games. I have designed them (in the conditions where Grand, Gross, etc. already exist) to add some cream to the cake by adding weird pieces like the joker, special promotion moves, stronger knights, bruhaha squares with different opening powers, and even alternative endgame conditions. I'd like here to express my concern than nobody noticed my proposed modification to the 2 apothecaries :(! (check the last 3 comments- the last one is actually me turning a bit too hippie ) : https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?itemid=171817414be164e8&order=DESC .

And now let's get to serious business. But first le me explain something in order to go further. Bear with me please.

First I will refrain from using words like chaotic, random and deterministic as they do hold specific meaning for the more mathematically aware, the pop culture tends to toy with their normal usage. They way I see things at least, knowledge acquiring has two extremes. The first is the tumultuous trial and error with learning from big data, creativity and maybe even a touch of madness found most in  peak science (the last one and a half decade even more) or in the natural evolution of life. The second is the steady, safe, consistent, orderly and reductionist way of the engineers. Meaning principles are fine, but how do we automate things to get things going. And I insist on automate. Chess is very much towards the second type. I'm sure many would disagree but remember what type of game chess actually is mathematically speaking.

So why this sudden philosophy burst?

Mostly because I do not think we should look for nextchess in the past  tradition but in the holdings of the future. As I have insisted earlier on the word automate. I want to argue for the fact that chess was always meant for computers, just that at the time of it's and it's predecessor birth there were no such things (in a practical 20th century way at least). Still of course there were people who found pleasure in such findings starting roughly in early middle ages (although the Western historical timeline does not have fully explanatory power I'll stick to this approximation). But then chess and it's relatives became increasingly mechanistic in a accelerated manner in the 20th century. So, the point here is that chess is a celebration of thoroughness and that is the context where we should start our search. But, what is chess in a general way? Hard to say exactly but I'll venture a description with a flavor of definition. Chess has the attributes of being a game of usually perfect information, usually without random elements (and for know I will insist on these usual cases), where pieces with different attributes interact on the discrete and finite board (again usually but the exceptions to these are rare). A more narrower definition could impose the regular winning condition, among other things. This description leaves enough room for what if scenarios so that we will put our lab coats, make "fun" variants, and design AI's that play them well.That to see what happens and in the process bring a new level over the type 1 way of acquiring knowledge. These are the nextchess(s). And dear colleagues the show must go on!

A small addition regarding the AI vs human challenges of the last few decades comes next. Looking in hindsight, it seems that the initial ones were designed to see how good chess engines of the time were. There were no better challenges for AIs than the best humans. Now AIs have each other for that (check TCEC). In time human vs AI became just a exercise of blunder checking for the human candidate as seen in the recent MVL-Komodo challenge I've mentioned a few days ago (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exgVvSauvhQ). So today is just engines. In time, when people will become androids, or who knows what, we will probably have individuals (for lack of a better term I'll use the popular transhumans) that will choose such a "career". But for know we should accept that and invent chess variants accordingly.

Lastly I'd tackle the popularity issue. People worry a bit about machine on machine challenge not being popular, but TCEC does decently and that is not even a game designed with the new ways in mind. And the next human generation will obviously have a totally different outlook on life (some of your are probably parents and know better). So, never say never.

Thanks for reading so far, I appreciate it.

And I closing please if you'd like to continue the discussion please touch on the following issues:

1. Is the many nextchess hypothesis reasonable?

2. Should we try to promote successful (be it at our small scale) variants?

3. Is the chess is for Automation/analyses hypotheses for what chess means and is best for pinpointing viable?

4. Should we invest time in AI contests?

5. (I have not actually tackled that yet) How should we encourage spectators for chess variants in TCEC like events (understanding that the first step is that spectators should have a good knowledge not just on the rules but also on the strategy and tactics of the game).

- please find the time to take a look on my latest apothecary changes :)!

Hi Aurelian

I think a single 2 player Next Chess could arise someday, but it would probably be some sort of extension of chess. Say 2D and likely on a square/rectangular board with 8-12 ranks by 8-12 files. I now wouldn't completely rule out other fairly regular shapes, such as 91-cell hexagonal, or 16x4 (or 16x5) circular, boards. The 6 chess piece types likely would be included, plus some extra type(s) that move symmetrically or else not too asymmetrically. However, Ultima style games may be considered, if not too complex rulewise. Same for using boards with special squares and such, again if not too complex. Also, a game likely shouldn't last for a lot of moves on average, at least for many less patient westerners, so that may rule out e.g. Chu Shogi. With all these constraints (for starters), that rules out many existing chess variants to be a Next Chess.

As far as multiple Next Chess' at the same time in history, you may draw encouragement from knowing that according to some searches I did, there are currently 200 million playing Chinese Chess (mostly Chinese people, one might guess), while there are 600 million adults playing chess, and 10 million Japanese playing Shogi, of the three classic recognized variants. So, it's possible already, say, tens of millions of people play both Chinese Chess and chess at the same time.

The Chess Variant Pages is doing its share to promote popular variants with play on Game Courier, alone, although at the moment only a relative few variants have been played 50+ times on GC until now. Unless anyone is prepared to court businesses (as in the case of Musketeer Chess figurines being mass produced) or make their own blog entries, etc., playing on Game Courier and elsewhere is a relatively low cost way to promote variants in terms of time and effort alone.

As far as AI goes, I'm not too knowledgeable, but I'm wary of the possible downside of it based on much Sci-Fi material on that theme alone, if we set aside philosophical or religious beliefs. Regarding AI vs. AI chess variant contests, I'd note at least some people enjoy watching caged battlebots smashing each other on TV, stll. :) Otherwise, chess AI that's evenly matched tends to produce a high rate of drawn games, though the play of something like Shogi (or games where draws are impossible) could well avoid that happening.

The Apothecary 1 and Apothecary 2 games seemed playable enough the way they started out at first in their preset forms (I saw your proposed changes long ago). I'd note as a possible cautionary tale that Omega Chess had a sequel game that seemed way too complicated and/or quirky, based on my reading the wiki for Omega Chess. In my own case I prefer never to change the rules for a game once I make a preset for it (though not knowing much about the effects of making changes to presets that have already been used for playing game[s] influences that viewpoint). I'd suggest if you implement your proposed changes all the same, you might make Apothecary 3 and Apothecary 4 presets (or whatever they'd be called), in case some or many might wish to play the original versions of those two games (that is, Apothecary 1 and Apothecary 2). It seems, just looking at the numbers, quite a number of people were content to play each with their original rules at the time. I'd not fix something that wasn't clearly broke, would be my own preference.

Thanks for your comments Kevin!

Under another thread (one of the ones about the idea of a Next Chess, I think), the possibility of affordably using holograms of chess variant sets and equipment (using star wars sci-fi technology for such), for the playing of games by hologram manipulation of some sort (say to be played on a coffeetable) was briefly discussed, as might it now be in this thread. Here's a wiki about holigraphy as it stands nowadays:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holography

[edit: Here's a link about a multi-user hologram table, a recent development:]

https://newatlas.com/hologram-tables-euclideon/50868/

Hello again,

it seems quite odd to me that not many care about this topic, as it used to be a  leading one on this website and I think with good reason.

In strengthening of my previous post here is an essay (although is titled research article the content does not seem to make it such a thing) of Daniel's Denett. It purpose os to raise a concern about meaningless philosophical endeavor. I think this heavily applies to chess variant design and as it goes a chess variant is the example in the article.

This is to say that we should aim for those variants that bring new meaning, not just crazy for the sake of crazy but consistently "good" as out of their "first principles" interesting higher truths emerge.

Regarding what it might take for there to be a Next Chess at some point, circa 2016 Fergus wrote:

"...Chess has been finely honed by natural selection to be free of arbitrariness. Every rule and piece in Chess serves a purpose, and none are arbitrary. Since Chess is what won the survival of the fittest among Chess variants, I expect that any variant capable of succeeding Chess would also have to be free of arbitrariness. But most Chess variants differ from Chess through some arbitrary change to it, and they easily get lost in a sea of variants that each differ from Chess in their own arbitrary ways..."

Inspired by this statement, albeit one that may need much elaboration, I took a stab at trying to show that chess is free of arbitrariness in 2016, in a Canadian chess forum's blog entry of mine. I could hardly come up with any sort of a 'rigourous proof', just my own intuitive reasoning and guesswork at some points, and probably not nearly covering all things that may be debateable. It really depends what one sees as arguably arbitary (or not) about chess. Some particularly problematical issues for me in particular were why White's king is to the right of the Q in the setup (my best guess is that for right-handed people playing White, it's slightly easier to castle kingside that way - poor Black suffers one more 'indignity' at the start though, since his K is to the left of his Q; otherwise having both sides' royalty placed in mirror image to the opponent's is logical). Also, having the square h1 a light square enables the saying 'queen goes on her own colour' to be used by both sides setting up the pieces, i.e. with a saying mentioning a lady (nicer than if h1 were a dark square). You can see how I sometimes had to stretch things. Castling involves a double-step by the K either left or right, I noted - I did not even try to guess why putting the K on b1 instead of c1 is any less desirable. Pawns initial double-step is to speed up the game, leading 'logically' to the en passant rule. I also briefly mentioned hexagonal and circular board variants, to try to justify an 8x8 square board (which we know with hindsight makes Bs and Ns of practically equal value on average). I did mention that good chess variants have compensating features for anything specific they lack compared to chess, so kind of a plug for chess variants on my chess message board's blog. The blog entry is very long, so I'm not sure I could post it here, in case anyone wants to read it in a comment.

For what it's worth, recently I googled 'Are the rules of chess arbitrary' and saw on the first few pages of results no sign of anyone agreeing that they are not - search results included quotations from writers, such as mathematicians, besides chess [variant] players. A common thing mentioned was the castling rules, besides pawn rules such as double-stepping.

Here's a link to the blog entry of mine in question:

http://www.chesscanada.info/forum/entry.php?109-Why-is-chess-so-popular-among-board-games-of-skill

I totally agree with Fergus there, I actually had this concept in mind but unfortunately did not bother with finding the quote so thanks. But that does not preclude the possibility (I obviously cannot speak for Fergus but I'm as sure as I can be that he would agree with me) that this could very well be a problem with several solutions. i mean there are sheep, cows and goats. They are all fine herbivores. And most likely it is by the laws of big numbers .

Also even more, Fergus mentioned (I don't recall the literal way) while recommending Gross Chess that there is room for niche variants, meaning people who like crazier (but definitely not inconsistent things) variant using joker or weird board topologies or who knows what?

About the forum link, I had not read each line but I get the point and you are correct. It is well done. Actaully Betza's articles (some touching exactly on this) were my entry point on this website :)!

I don't see how this can even be a point of discussion. The fact that other variants than orthodox Chess exist that are more popular in the world as a whole, and certainly more popular in the areas where they originated shows that things like board size and how exactly the pieces move can very well be different without jeopardizing the success of the game. How we play Chess is mostly determined by historic accident.

Pieces like Knight are not a necessity; e.g. Chu Shogi, which was the dominant Chess variant in Japan for many centuries, doesn't have Knights. The idea of a Knight is rather obvious: it has the closest move that a Queen does not have. Oblique moves increase the variety of moves. This contributes to the appeal of the game, because it allows attacks on other pieces that are not automatically reciprocated. But Shogi addresses this by having the pieces move in non-8-fold-symmetric ways, or limit their sliding range, so that the table of what can safely attack what can be dense enough without oblique moves.

Most rules of Chess serve a purpose, but that doesn't automatically imply they are the unique solution to the problem they cure. E.g. without double push (or on a deeper board) the opening would be boringly slow. But Asian variants solve this by starting the Pawns in more advanced locations.

The rule 'stalemate = draw' seems rather arbitrary to me. The biggest impact of that rule is that it makes the KPK end-game more drawish. I am not sure if that should be seen as an advantage. It also doesn't seem to matter much whether the initial setup has reflection or rotation symmetry. Whether the white King starts on the left or right half of the board I would not even consider a rule change.

Where is it documented that Chu Shogi was the dominant Chess variant in Japan for centuries?

HG,

I'm not exactly sure what can't be the point of the discussion. Is that the fact the several nextchesses could happen. That was the point I'm making to couter-balance the idea of a dominat "next variant" which used to be at least pretty popular on this website. Indeed to me it is obvious that there is not just one "good" solution but several. But it is probably not obvious for everybody :)!

Anyway even if pieces like knights (and most other stuff maybe) are not necessities, anyone ca easily argue that combining styles could bring new interesting concepts, higher truths if I may. Sure new way of getting into trouble when designing are to be taken care of, but in opposition to most people I think more is better for the forgeable future (I don't mean 32x32 games, I mean feasible more).

I think chess popularity had an accidental side to it. It so happened that a good game had not an equal competitor and a snowball effect took place. But the interesting part if why is a good game. This discussion is overly done so no point into getting here again. But waht about the future? This was my point. I guess I did not get it across nicely :)!

I was unaware any chess variant (or board game of pure skill) was currently more popular than chess globally. I had trouble as it is tracking down the figures for Chinese Chess, Shogi and Go (40 million) that I've seen, aside from FIDE's well-known claim of 600 million adults playing chess.

Regarding the pieces other than K & Q, I see R and B as the two logical sliders to include, as ranks, files and diagonals are natural terms for most people to visualize movements in. The chess N I see as a piece type trying to logically/simply compliment the B, in a way, since it moves to the second closest squares of the opposite colour to which it started on. If it moved to the closest opposite coloured squares, a N would be a weak version of a rook, and not anywhere near in value to a B on 8x8. The latter would also be true if a N were lame like its Chinese Chess counterpart (something I didn't bother to mention in my blog entry). Then there's that a N makes a move that a Q cannot.

Stalemate I wrote a bit about in my blog entry. The main point was that good defence is not punished, whereas often poor prosecution of a winning advantage is punished, aside from all the wonderful draw-saving stalemate combinations that can occur in chess. [edit: For what it's worth, I also mentioned that nice smothered and back rank mates are possible due to the pawns starting on the second rank in chess.]

My blog entry is only meant as a provocative stab at the subject of whether the rules of chess are arbitrary - it seems almost everyone takes for granted that they are. Maybe this might prove the stuff of idle philosophical debate for some, but it may be relevant to grasping what principle(s) might govern any quest for judging/finding or creating a chess variant that proves to be massively popular at some point, if Fergus is right about the rules of chess not being arbitrary, in some sense (thanks to how the game evolved into its modern form, with many largely rejected forms along the way). Regarding other chess variants that may qualify, in my blog entry I was somewhat critical of Circular Chess since for one thing R+K cannot normally mate lone K, but a counterpoint is that at least K+P always beats lone K since stalemate is impossible - an example of how at least some chess variants can compensate for things they may lack compared to chess. It's just how good potential steady players think that the compensation is, assuming they've been exposed to chess itself.

The Knight doesn't just complement the Bishop. It complements both the Bishop and the Rook, because it leaps to the nearest spaces that these two pieces cannot reach. 

@Fergus

&the rest

I agree that the knight move is complemtenting both the diagonal and orthogonal move. But I like to point out something once Betza has said that it is very helpfull coincidence that the very different knight and bishop are so close in value on an 8x8 board. That is in a way arbitrary (in the way in the usual math pi is 3,.14... maybe someone with better philosophy background could explaid that sort of arbitrariness better) but the emerging properties of that are quite nice as now more diverse endgames are possible.

That the Knight is roughly equivalent in power to a Bishop was probably one of the factors that contributed to it being used in Chess. If the Knight were as weak as a Wazir or Ferz, it might have been replaced by a Knightrider, and if it were as powerful as an Amazon, it might have been omitted.

@HG,

By the way, technically the Chu shogi lyon has a knight move, even a enhanced one actually. But anyway the hippogonal pieces are are very basic thing to need to compensate for :)!

@Fergus

I agree with you and I think the lesson to bear in mind is that we should aim for such things in future games. For example my probably only criticism to gross chess is the unchanged knight. You said once that that makes it more a defense piece because otherwise you lose turns in order to get the knight to go offensive. But nothing is exchangeable for knight, as the vao is likely weaker (this could not be true in the opening though). I tend to think natural knights for 12x12 could be LT (camel-treaper which is colourbound but has a nice distribution of destinations), ZH (zebra-threeleaper), CH (camel-treeleaper) and ZT (zebratreaper). The need 4 moves to exit the board starting in the oposite edge which makes them relatively "as" fast, but they are a bit more awkward to use. They are probably a bit stronger than 12x12 bishops as per increased forking power. Also they work differently with pawn chains. So maybe to get the chess feel you should allow pawns to always be able to go 2 squares to either move or capture with keeping en passant always :)!

I think there is a fair chance that Chess in its various forms is the world's most popular board game, or thereabouts, but if FIDE claim 600 million adults play Chess (and presumably they mean play Western chess regularly) they are claiming perhaps one in eight of the world's adult population do so - a big claim indeed.

Shaye Nicholls (pp Glenn Nicholls)

Somehow there might be a case for Chinese Chess lacking or mostly lacking in arbitrariness, which could fit into Fergus' thesis about any Next Chess candidate, as Chinese Chess is hugely popular (if possibly less so than chess). I think I'd have to strain myself a bit harder to figure out a plausible argument for why the considerably popular shogi (Japanese Chess) would also be lacking [at least mostly] in arbitrariness (that goes double for Chu Shogi), in view of the way the generals move seemingly so oddly, alone. At least by coincidence, shogi seems far less popular than Chinese Chess (or chess), though the real reason would seem to be that China has long had a much larger population than Japan.

If it's accepted chess is by far the most popular chess variant globally, I repeat I'd think any Next Chess would likely be some sort of extention of chess, though that could mean plausible candidates for such could be among the larger-board-size, different sliders and leapers crowd that H.G. has in the past expressed his disdain for, if nothing else due to his preference for ground-breaking variants. The latter may be becoming harder to come up with if they are of any quality, though, aside from that they may prove too complex rulewise at times for the average western grandpa or young child.

Today I was thinking about possible obstacles to more than one chess variant being played by several (or many) people face-to-face presently (or in future) at given location(s), ideally at CV clubs (but at the least at some CVs tournament held at a physical site). One matter is how to determine which variant(s) will be played (all year round or even on one given day), e.g. in a club, but what may entirely determine this at any given time is the CV equipment available at a given location, for a given time period.

We've heard of card sharks, who are good at all sorts of card games that use a standard 52 card deck, but CV sharks might be harder to ever come by in large numbers in offline play, since all CVs do not use the same equipment. Still, offline CV tournaments (or clubs) that involve a relatively small number of CVs (not always the same ones, necessarily) might become relatively common one day. Standardized, mass produced CV equipment that can be used for a large number of existing CVs would be helpful. CVs that can use the same equipment as for chess (maybe with a small number of extra pieces added, as in Seirawan Chess) would be particularly golden, for the time being at least.

There's also the problem of how to make more people interested enough in CVs locally, though a potential CV physical club (or tournament) organizer can learn from any local Bridge, Chess, Go etc. club or tournament organizer that they might know. An extra chore could be to make a pamphlet about whatever are deemed to be the most essential CV 'basics' (besides the CV club/tournament location & hours info) to distribute locally, perhaps even in schools. At the moment tournaments for bughouse just by itself (or as side events to more serious children's chess tournaments) have something of a foothold, in Canada at least, now more often with cash prizes involved. Face-to-face events have one advantage, based on the experience of chess players and organizers, in that perhaps any cheating (especially with cash prizes at stake) could be easier to detect than for online play (sticking to the latter alone has some big advantages otherwise, as we have seen with Game Courier's features, plus chess and/or CV servers that offer fast [e.g. 5-minutes per side] time controls for CV players, for the given CVs that are available to choose from).

Meanwhile, here's a link provided on this very website, which includes mention of a CV Construction Kit:

https://www.chessvariants.com/where.html

John Davis wrote: "Hobby Lobby sells checkered fabric with 2 1/2 inch squares. It's 17 squares across and as long as you want. For pieces, printing out your favorite graphics and glueing them to poker chips is the easiest."

Thanks for the reply, John. By a websearch, I've seen that Hobby Lobby's online store does business with a very large number of countries outside of the USA.

The vast majority of CVs would seem to use square or rectangular shaped boards, so the checkered fabric would seem to be potentially quite a useful resource, say for use in [school] clubs. The use of poker chips plus glued-on printouts for pieces would certainly be alright for school sets, IMHO. Future CV club(s) with adults might be more finicky about wanting to have 3 dimensional pieces with their CV boards, at least after some time passes, I'd guess, but by then the club(s) would have a body of members that might be willing to pay (through any increased membership dues) for 3D CV pieces, if there are insufficient said pieces available to the club(s) otherwise. A problem with my theory there, though, is that 3D CV pieces still seem quite expensive, especially if a large number are to be bought (not to mention what happens if at least some of the said pieces are eventually broken or 'lost'). Maybe there's another way out, though, if a 3D printer can be used to produce 3D CV pieces cheaply (or there's CVP's ideas for homemade 3D CV pieces made in an old-fashioned way - in particular, altering existing plastic 3D chess pieces).

[edit: Googling the search term "3d printing chess variant pieces" seems to yield some interesting results.]

Could there ever be a meaningful world chess variants championship? This may just be a silly question, in that the answer might seem to be that, since obviously there are limitless CVs possible (and CVs are being invented all the time), there could be no meaningful CVs world championship possible (the opposite being true in the case of a given single CV).

Nevertheless, Mind Sports championships are regularly held now, although one might argue that since the choice of 'mind sports' played by the contestants is to some extent rather arbitrary, the winner of such a championship has a somewhat nebulous honour at best.

If we in the CV community ever in future wish to confine a similar sort of championship to a carefully selected set of CVs, to be the basis of a CVs world championship tournament or match(es), how might such a selection of CVs ever give the winner of such a CV world championship a clearer sort of honour, relatively close to as is the case for a chess world championship winner, for example?

Our website chessvariants.com offers its own lists of what are (currently!?) considered the 'best' CVs, although such lists would at some point, to satisfy such a careful selection process, need to be narrowed down to a smaller, single list of (currently) 'best' CVs, perhaps based primarily (if not exclusively) on the currently most popular CVs played. If this could be done by a world CV authority organization at some point (or perhaps simply by eliminating all but CVs [if ever significantly more than one] from a future Mind Sports list of games etc. for their championships), a world CVs championship might to some extent be meaningful. Note that as newer CVs eventually become popular enough, they could be taken into account in the selection process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_sport

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_championships_in_mind_sports

I'm not sure if the comunity is large enough to warrant such a competition. Nor the audience. Maybe we should stick to organizing tournaments here :)!

Which reminds me, I'm putting together an outline for Game Courier Tournament 2019 now.  Stay tuned!

@ Aurelian:

Remember, this thread is all about ideas for the future of Cvs, maybe even the far future, perhaps. :)

Even with that said, there's already a list of my own I could suggest of 10 fairly well-known and relatively popular CVs, which might form the basis of even a not-too-distant-future CVs world championship, perhaps (note if ever an arrangement with Mind Sports competitions could be made, there'd be less need for an overall world CVs body, maybe). The list starts with the 3 Classics from the chessvariants.com Recognized Variants page (although these 3 are in the Mind Sports Olympiad already, albeit via the way it is currently organized):

1. Chess;

2. Shogi (Japanese Chess);

3. Xiangqi (Chinese Chess);

4. (4 player) Bughouse;

5. Crazyhouse;

6. Fischer Random (aka Chess960);

7. Grand Chess;

8. Glinski's Hexagonal Chess;

9. Circular Chess;

10. Seirawan Chess.