Two Kingdoms

Awesome. That's a bit more clear. Shuffling isn't about just letting the pieces sit behind a the initial setup and waiting for a futile attack. I tested this and it seems that just wouldn't work. The attack always came, and I was fighting hard not to lose. Similar to standard chess, but with far more weaknesses to defend. It's more about needing a great deal more moves to get the game going. I do like how the knights hold an advantage over bishops when attacking through the castle walls, and the bishops obviously are preferred over knights for their long range on a board this size. I'd like to stick with traditional pieces, so I'll try shrinking the board and see if it speeds up gameplay.

If there needs to be 200 moves, then that's hours of gameplay, which is not only not in the interest of keeping the playerbase, but also because it's not a good practice in general. Let's think about why hundreds of moves can't be made in most games: the 50-move rule. If there's so many pawns and so many pieces that it takes an extremely long time to even reach the endgame (or maybe even remove the endgame altogether), then there's likely other issues as well.

I do believe that 4 Player Chess standard has gone upwards to 250 moves in 2800+ rated ultrabullet matches, but that's a different story.

Cool. Although, how long would just be too long for a variant assuming everything else about the variant is fine? 200 moves? 300 moves? Even 400 moves? Or...more?