Greetings All.

Horde Chess is an interesting variation of chess. At first glance it seem a daunting task for white to eat all those pawns. However white is expected to win and usually does, especially if white is an experienced player.

There are times when black wins the experienced white player but there is no clear cut strategy for black partly because the outcome of the game has more to do with how white plays. This is not to say that we can't come up with an effective strategy for black.

Winning Horde Chess as Black feels good, and we can leave it let people experiment with strategies for black. Instead of modifying Horde chess we can have Variants of Horde Chess. There are good suggestions on this board to aid black.

One suggestion is that Black can get two more pawns. At first thought this seems like a cosmetic change but it might just be enough to even the game. And this may be the easiest variant to implement on the computer program that supervises the game on Brainking. It's worth a try.

The super pawn idea sounds promising but may be more difficult to implement.

Part of the idea behind "horde" is that they are all essentially the same thing. Like a Horde of Savages. This said, We could allow the pawns to do something as simple as moving backwards. Just one step back to defend a fellow pawn may have saved many games for black.

Yes, Black does need a whole new swing of confidence but the whole horde should have the same swing.

My question is, How soon can we play these variants? Until we try them we would know for sure the actual effect.

Regards,
HB.