The parable of Bug House. The world's toughest chess variation. (opens in new tab)

I know that chess is probably the most traditional "thinking" game to play in the western world, but when I read this line:

> I think there may be a lot of neat similarities to chess and entrepreneurship, but ultimately chess is too controlled.

...I felt compelled to mention Go. In general, Go is much less constrained than Chess. The strategy plays on many axes: not only offense vs defense (as chess) but also territory guarding vs invasion, speed vs strength, and risk-taking vs conservative-waiting. In general, I would say Go has many more parallels with business (and life in general). I've recently been turning my passing interest in Go into a full-blown obsession, and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking for an alternative to Chess.

Man, I played this back in high school when I was on the chess team. It promotes such a different level of thought than normal chess, but when you get a teammate who literally starts taking pieces so you can place them and vice-versa, it gets insane.

I think the real benefit of this game is that it teaches you to read chess boards quickly. If you get good, you can glance at your opponents board and get a quick idea of things you can do in a few moves to help them.

This is quite similar to Shogi, a Japanese variant of chess where you can put down any of your opponent's captured pieces. From what I know, that game is highly strategic; since all of your potential pieces come directly from your opponent, it's probably less chaotic than this variant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogi

This game has been around for a while. We used to play in my chess club after people got bored at a practice session or fooling around waiting for the next tournament game. It's a fun game to play but it's much more difficult to plan ahead when your opponent can drop any piece on you anywhere. I found that it didnt really promote the deep rational thinking that comes naturally with chess and is fundamentally different.

Just a clarification on the rules. You can't place all pieces "anywhere on the board." Pawns can't be placed in the first or last rows so no illegal placements and no instant promotion.

Also fun is the version where pieces "respawn". There are 6 respawn points. Every minute, a dice is rolled and the piece captured earliest (of all captured pieces) is placed at the respawn point indicated by the dice (knocking off any piece that happens to be there, of course).

There are no stalemates in this version.

My son plays it. But the way it was conveyed to me, it sounds like "The Secret". The whole point is to learn to wish for pieces. If you wished loudly enough, for example "I could checkmate if I had a pawn in my next move", then it could magically appear out of no where.

Back in high school we played Bug House during lunch and at the end of chess practice. This is easily some of the most fun that can be had with a chess board.

I think Fischer Random is much more challenging...

you guys are all missing something: the money factor. This is why none of these games will mirror startuping adequatly.

Poker, with its structural luck factor and money factor is by far the closest match. I think the variant that best mirrors it is tournament poker, MTTs especially. If you look at PNL graphs from MTT players, you will see they mirror startup PNL very well.