Perhaps another possibility of new games to be added could be Shuffle Chess. This was sort of 'invented' by the great American Chess World Champion Bobby Fischer.
Rules of the game is the game starts with an empty board. White adds a piece on the first rank, which black need to mirror on the eigth rank, then blackplces adds a piece which white needs to mirror, etc. When all pieces are placed the pawns are added on the second and seventh ranks, and chessgame continues with the normal rules.
Placing the pieces involves following rules:
1. The two bishops need to be placed on different coloured squares.
and 2. The king must be placed on a square where he has a rook to his right and a rook to the left. (There can be other pieces between the rooks and king however)
The big advantage of this type of chess is that it rules out some vast opening theory, which I still see in a lot of my games. I am currently playing a game against Richard Malaschitz, that is around move 20 and I still got a line from a book. I have seen this in many other games.
If we're going to get into Chess variants, I have 2 suggestions which I believe are better than Fischer Random Chess (AKA Shuffle Chess).
My first suggestion is what is known on FICS as Wild 0. It's regualar Chess, ewxcept that Black's king and Queen are reversed. Because the knights, bishops, and rooks all start on their normal squares, almost all *patterns* from regular chess apply. But the simple switching of the two pieces means that any deep book *lines* will be moot. In theory Wild 0 has the disadvantage that encyclopedias of book lines could be developed more easily than they could in Fischer Random. But I don't think that's a realistic concern for the forseeable future. The game would have to be much more popular before that would happen.
My second suggestion is Crazyhouse. On the surface Crazyhouse is a 1-board version of Bughouse, with which you may be familiar.
In Crazyhouse when a player captures a piece, the piece changes color and goes into the reserves of the capturing player. A turn consists of either moving a piece as in Chess or placing a piece from your reserves. most reserve pieces may be placed on any unoccupied square but pawns may not be placed on the 1st of 8th ranks. When a pawn reaches the 8th rank (not a long reach if it was placed on the 7th) it promotes as in normal Chess, but when captured it reverts to being a pawn.
For those familiar with Bughouse, I note that the play is less similar than you might think. The fact that you get only the pices that *you* (not a partner) capture allows for more exacting calculation on both offense and defense. And the clock-management that is essential in Bughouse is absent in Crazyhouse.
I love to play chess and I would certainly welcome all of the chess variants mentioned above, but I myself would MUCH rather first see new games implemented here that are NOT available elsewhere. Fischer Random, Crazyhouse, etc., can already be played on all of the major chess servers: ICC, FICS, USCL, etc. There are literally thousands of other enjoyable abstract games that exist that could be implemented on this server besides chess variants. I don't think the world needs another chess site... or backgammon site, etc.
This site has 2 features that make it fill a niche that the chess servers fo not.
1) Correspondance Play: I believe at least one of the pay services has some limited support for Correspondance Chess but it's not their focus. The free server has no support for it at all.
2) Permanent Game Records: The combination of correspondnace playw with a database that includes all previous games by an opponent offers a unique way for non-grandmaster players to improve their play and develop their opening repertoire -- whether they like it or not in some cases.
I too would like to play a variety of games, but I don't want Little Golem to neglect Chess, as it is a very welcome addition to the chess world.
I would rather have crazyhouse here. I'm a 13 year old expert at that game who wouldn't mind playing it at more than one server. If we did have it, I'm rated 2000 at it, and I could help out newbies to this game. I love it, and am seriously addicted to it.
Little Golem