Hey guys, I know I don’t post here often, but I came up with this game a few days ago at three in the morning and I thought you might like to check it out. I call it ‘Chess Re-Rolled’. I was going to call it Dice Chess, but that already exists and is different.

Equipment:
A chess board
2 tokens
16d6 for each player, different colors

(yes, I know that it is a rediculous amount of dice. I caniballized my Stack set to make it work. Several sets of Yahtzee or another dice game would as well)

Set Up:
Each player sets up their dice in the standard chess configuration, with the numbers on top standing for each type of piece:
1 - pawn
2 - rook
3 - knight
4 - bishop
5 - queen
6 - king
Each player also gets one token.

Play:
Play is as standard chess, with the following additions:
Instead of moving one of your pieces on your turn, you may give your token to the other player to re-roll one of your pieces. The piece remains in its space, but it is changed to a different type of piece depending on the number (as above). You may not re-roll kings, and you may not re-roll if you do not have a token.

Winning:
There are two ways to win.
If ANY of your opponents kings are in checkmate at the end of their turn, you win.
If ALL of your pieces are kings and none of them are in check, you win.

Comments:
I played this several times and enjoyed it very much. Once you memorize the numbers, play is very smooth. I like it because it takes care of everything I don’t like about chess. Perhaps I’m bad at chess, but when I play it seems like it takes forever to get the good pieces out, and once you do they’re captured so quickly that you run out and all you have left are pawns, so you try to get them to the other side of the board and get them promoted, but that hardly ever happens. In Chess Re-Rolled, you can promote those useless pawns immediately (if randomly) and, look at that! They’re already on the front line. If you lose all your rooks, try to roll for some more!
There are a couple of mechanics I find very elegant. The tokens are a simple way to make sure neither player re-rolls too often. Also, there is always a slight risk in re-rolling that you will get a new king and he will be in danger. But, this is offset by the alternate win rule, for those players who wish to ’shoot the moon’, as it were. Since you can’t re-roll kings, as the game progresses you slowly accumulate them, and it is not uncommon to end the game with three kings on both sides.

Let me know what you think.