Play 11 chess variants online — free

Chess Variants brings rare chess rules together in one place: exploding pieces, dropped pieces, a duck that blocks squares and more. Play the AI or a friend, no download needed.

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11 game modes

♟️ Classic Chess — The game everything else grows from: castling, en passant and promotion, with a clock if you want one.
🎲 Chess960 (Fischer Random) — One of 960 possible back-rank setups is chosen at random, so memorised openings are useless and understanding wins.
🔄 Crazyhouse — Every piece you capture goes into your reserve, and on a later turn you may drop it on any empty square instead of moving.
👥 Bughouse — Two boards, two partners per team. Whatever you capture is handed to your partner, who can drop it on their board.
✔️ Three-check — Give check three times and you win at once, no mate needed. Every check is counted.
👑 King of the Hill — Bring your king to d4, e4, d5 or e5 and the game is yours, even without a mate.
💥 Atomic Chess — Every capture detonates: the capturing piece, the captured piece and all non-pawn pieces around it disappear.
🦆 Duck Chess — After each move you also move the duck, a neutral blocker that nobody can capture or pass through (except knights).
🔀 Antichess — Captures are mandatory and the goal is reversed: you win by running out of pieces or having no legal move.
🏁 Racing Kings — A race on one board: get your king to the eighth rank first. Checks are forbidden for both sides.
🧟 Horde — White has 36 pawns and no king; Black has a regular army. White wins by checkmate, Black by capturing every white piece.

More to explore

The game interface is in Russian for now; every rule is explained in English on the mode pages above.