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My current thrust is to come up with a form of social chess - something that might be played more casually than most of the other multi-player versions. I'm not sure how your comments apply to these ideas - the concept of letting players choose their own opponent rather than assigning one by position is intriguing, but requires the players to weigh questions of relative placements in order to attack or defend. As normal chess has a very hard and fast opponent rule (beat the other guy) it seems more logical to allow the order of play also determine victory and failure conditions. I had assumed the game "won" when the first checkmate occurred. In terms of making a more challenging game, many of the other comments you made would certainly apply - such as taking over the pieces of a checkmated opponent and going on the checkmate others, for example - but this would also lengthen the game, and one of the problems I am trying to address here is that the games just run too long, people don't get to play fast enough, and lose interest.