Fun Chess Variant [Pre-Internet Era]

I was once the best player in a chess circle of friends. One of the players brought in a friend to challenge me to a game. He said he didn't want to play a straight up game because he thought I was to prepared and studied for him to match up fairly. So I told him, lets play a game where you can preset the pieces anyway you like. We put a divider Screen down the middle of the chess board, so that neither player could see the others side. We then arranged the pieces any way desired, and lifted the divider and played the game. We agreed that pawns could only move one square to avoid en passant, and had no castling. It turned out to be a very interesting variant. I beat him easily, because he had no concept of basic chess principles. I never have been able to name this variant...Suggestions? This game variant will require a real chess board and chess set. Try it... Its fun! :]

Actually this does sound interesting. Maybe even if it generated a TOTALLY random position with all the pieces on the board it still would be fun.

Nice

To me this sounds like the setup works in Arimaa. Though I like the slight difference they made there, black (or in Arimaa silver) can see the other player's setup before setting up his own pieces. That way he can compensate for playing second.

When playing black with this variant...one must allow for playing second and set up the positon to defend for it. I found it to be no more of a disadvantage than playing black in regular chess. Try it and see how you would set your position up. Its a nice diversion from standard play. :]

I see that it is probably not more disadvantagoues than standard chess, but it chess it IS a disadvantage to play black. So since there is a simple option to compensate for that one should use it (imo).
So have you tried my idea in real game. Does black overcompensate there? (which would be bad of course but could also mean that white has to keep it in mind when setting up to find setups where no reaction would really hurt him)

Name = screen chess. It is oneof many hundreds of variants.