Capablanca chess

Capablanca believed that chess would be played out in a few decades (meaning games between grandmasters would always end in draws).

This threat of "draw death" for chess was his main motivation for creating a more complex version of the game.

Capablanca also experimented with a 10×10 board size with a different initial setup and where pawns could advance up to three squares on their first move.

I played many test games with Capablanca, and they rarely lasted more than twenty or twenty-five moves.

Capablanca was not the first person to add the archbishop and the chancellor to the normal chess set, though he is the most famous.

In 1617, Pietro Carrera published a book Il Gioco degli Scacchi, which contained a description of a chess variant played on an 8×10 board.

[7][8] His likely primary motivation for the design was either the limitations of opening theory in this time or that he already foresaw the logic of chess playing out to the game being about the second player’s response to the King’s or queen’s pawn opening and he was not as concerned with avoiding structural weaknesses in the new game’s starting position created by a potential new piece standing on a given file, as with the archbishop between the knight and the rook leaving its own pawn unprotected.

Aberg followed Murray's description, which was wrong, and invented a new game by switching the archbishop and the chancellor, thus reaching exactly the setup proposed by the 17th century Italian master.

John Kipling Lewis re-invented it independently in 2007, giving it the name of Victorian Chess.

Each side has additionally two pieces in hand (called a hawk and an elephant in Seirawan Chess): The elephant and the hawk are introduced to the game in the following way: whenever the player moves a piece (king, queen, knight, bishop or rook) from its starting position (that hasn't already been moved), one of the pieces in hand may be placed immediately on the square just vacated.

Pawns may promote to a hawk or an elephant in this game (in addition to the normal chess pieces).

(In cylindrical chess, bishops become even more valuable, having a base value of 4 pawns compared to 5 for the rook.)