Extinction Chess

I would love to see this variant on chess.com: 

“Extinction”  Chess  Variant

1.      The goal is to reach a position where your opponent is missing all pieces of one type:  the King, or the Queen, or both Bishops, or both Knights, or both Rooks, or all 8 pawns.

 2.      All rules of orthodox chess are followed, with the following exceptions:

•  There is no “checkmate”.
• There is no “check”.  Therefore castling is not constrained by ‘being in check’ or ‘moving through check’.
• Pawns must promote on reaching the 8^th rank.  If you move your last remaining Pawn to the 8^th rank then you lose the game, unless you capture a piece on that move and cause an extinction (i.e. the consequence of the capture is evaluated before the consequence of the promotion).

3.      A trivial example game:  1. e4, a6  2. Bc4, a5  3. Qh5, a4  4. Qxf7, Kxf7 ... Black wins.

4.      Why play this variant?

• Extinction requires comparable skill to that of orthodox chess, and so doesn’t suffer from the skill-obscuring quackery of some variants (e.g. Dark Chess).
• There is no ‘book’, so book weanies are required to play using skill rather than memory (be sure to have paramedics in the room).
• Because there are so many game-winning targets, the tactical aspect of the game is very sharp.  Long and exciting sacrificial sequences are common as one player gives up piece after piece while chasing down the last of a kind.

I like it!  Did you come up with this yourself, or did you find it somewhere?  Anyway, does extinction apply also to promoted pieces?  Or only original ones?  I mean, you promote a pawn and get a new queen, then lose your original queen.  Do you lose the game (if you still retain your new queen)?

It's quite fun.  But don't get too down on Dark Chess, which is a blast!

OK, I'll bite ... how is dark chess played?  And can it be played here?

No, basically you only see the squares that your pieces can get to; everything else is hidden in some way, which makes a particular program for running it essential.  It's not all that mindless, as you have to consider past moves and guess where your opponent might have moved, but for the most part it's sheer guesswork.  Often leading to inadvertant sacrifices

So similar to battleship?

Yeah, I guess it has that similarity, except of course one can move pieces into the opposing half of the board as is always the case with chess.  And, all you have to do is destroy the king, not the whole army.

Sounds like fun!

Nice idea! Dark chess doesn't seem that bad... though you must have alot of luck.

I found this statement about the history of Extinction: "This game was invented by Games editor-in-chief R. Wayne Schmittberger in 1985 under the name Survival of the Species."

About the extra Queen scenario: you need to keep one alive on the board, and it doesn't matter which. You can have extra Kings as well. As I recall though, pawn promotion is rare -- if your position is dominant enough to get a pawn to the 8th, likely there were forced wins for you before that.

Good point!  I wish we could play that here!  Dark chess too!

It would difficult to create two separate programs!

Is there any site that actually has an Extinction Chess server, rather than something that explains it?

There is a game site called "It's Your Turn" (http://www.itsyourturn.com/) that has Extinction and quite a few other chess variants. Most of chess.com's chess-friendly tools aren't available there, but basic mechanics were okay when I played there several years ago.