i see quite a few things have been posted on this subject while i was out
of town this weekend. i would also caution against too many large
variants for the same reason that they take much longer to play. in a
previous comment i listed a bunch of larger variants as possibilities, but
i wasn't suggested we play all of them, just that they were all good
possibilities. i would also be careful about small variants that are
chosen. as both a game designer and judge, i know that designing a small
chess variant is much more difficult than designing a medium or large one.
i found very very few small variants that i was truly impressed with, and
even fewer that were so well designed that they would not have been
improved if the ideas had been extended to a larger game. even some of
the games that ranked high in some of the contests i found to be quite
weak.