A couple of year ago I played at FICS. One of the wild variants I fancied there had the traditional setup of an 8x8 board, 8 pawns on the 2nd row (7th for black), and 8 pieces on the first (8th) row. The pieces were not only randomly placed, but also randomly drawn - with the restriction of having exactly one king. Blacks setup mirrorred whites. So you could have a game with 3 rooks, 3 bishops, a knight and a king. Or a king and 7 queens, if you were (un)lucky enough.