I feel compelled to say that, Coronavirus shenanigans aside, Wijk an Zee has just finished and was a fantastic event with many interesting and decisive games. Classical chess does not need fixing, even at the highest level.
It’s fun that we can run these experiments though. I’d love to test out some of the variants a friend and I came up with! One of my favourites was starting with all the pieces off the board and a move was either to put a piece on your own half of the board (king had to come first) or move an existing piece. Another was having a mark on the bottom of one pawn on either side, and as a move you could look to see if a pawn was the “assassin” and if so, immediately move it. This of course meant that in some circumstances you could win on the first turn by capturing the king.
When I was in high school I attempted to code a "Fog-of-War" chess where different pieces had different sight ranges.
The King had no sight individually, but their range was the sight-range of all pieces within one piece from them (because they could relay information)
However exploring chess variants is fun. Gary Kasparov very much enjoyed his random chess tournament as did spectators. What is good can be made better.
We didn’t really give them names, these were things we came up with ourselves (perhaps not original ideas though!) I suspect the first would be ruined quite quickly by computer analysis or really any calculation at all but we had fun. :)
It’s fun that we can run these experiments though. I’d love to test out some of the variants a friend and I came up with! One of my favourites was starting with all the pieces off the board and a move was either to put a piece on your own half of the board (king had to come first) or move an existing piece. Another was having a mark on the bottom of one pawn on either side, and as a move you could look to see if a pawn was the “assassin” and if so, immediately move it. This of course meant that in some circumstances you could win on the first turn by capturing the king.