I find it amusing that because of your self-imposed slavery to The Rules, you could never have come up with the game of bughouse in the first place. Two boards? Chess is played with one! That's the rules! Dropping pieces on the board? That's a terrible idea! Once a piece is captured, it's captured! Four players? What heresy! Chess is the purest form of mind to mind combat!

Besides, this article has very little to do with bughouse per se and everything to do with relaxing the mind in between work sprints. Seymour Cray used to do it by digging tunnels. I doubt that his tunnels conformed to the Rules of Tunnels but he did get quite a bit of work done in his lifetime, which is the point here.