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Well there's Monster chess: http://www.chessvariants.org/unequal.dir/monster.html

Another big difference between actual warfare and chess is with the latter you don't have to have a supply and logistics system to provide shelter, food, water etc to your pawns ;).

You were probably joking when you posted, but there is a chess variant that looks interesting:

http://www.chessvariants.org/incinf.dir/kriegspiel.html

Over at The Chess Variants page, there used to be a rather prolific inventor named Ralph Betza. Not only was he a very strong Chess player (FIDE master), he also invented dozens of chess variants and was the first person to come up with a lot of innovative Chess Variant pieces.

We haven't heard from him in years. We don't know whether he is alive or dead. It would have been nice if there was some way for his family to inform us who only knew him through the internet about his (possible) death.

Also, as the primary maintainer of an open-source project, I have just given my family the email address of my webmaster so that they can let him know just in case I have an untimely death (no, I have no plans to die; I plan on soon getting married to my fiancée and staying married to her for many decades), in addition to a link to Facebook's deceased form.

This way, should the unspeakable happen and I die, people know about it right away and can figure out who will become the maintainer of my open-source project.

Over at The Chess Variants page, there used to be a rather prolific inventor named Ralph Betza. Not only was he a very strong Chess player (FIDE master), he also invented dozens of chess variants and was the first person to come up with a lot of innovative Chess Variant pieces.

We haven't heard from him in years. We don't know whether he is alive or dead. It would have been nice if there was some way for his family to inform us who only knew him through the internet about his (possible) death.

Also, as the primary maintainer of an open-source project, I have just given my family the email address of my webmaster so that they can let him know just in case I have an untimely death (no, I have no plans to die; I plan on soon getting married to my fiancée and staying married to her for many decades), in addition to a link to Facebook's deceased form.

This way, should the unspeakable happen and I die, people know about it right away and can figure out who will become the maintainer of my open-source project.

If you game fits in the general category of 2 player, no hidden information games, then you might want to try having a prototype made using Zillions of Games. This program allows you to define the board and movement rules for just about any combiniation you can think of. The basic game plays most of the classics and you can download thousands of versions from their website or Chess Variants

If your game has hidden information which is only know to one player, then Zillions can't handle that, but if your pure strategy, you should be fine. Programming a Zillions requires learning a lisp-like language, it's pretty easy but has its quirks. One nice thing about Zillions is you can create your own new game and have the computer kick your ass at it, that way you can expose flaws and exploits you might have missed. Plus, it would be easy to distibute to your playtesters.

Take a look at http://www.chessvariants.org/small.dir/losalamos.h tml, a small varient. Less squares used means less possibilities, so the tactics are simpler. That one was used in early chess computers. It also means that you will also be trying to work out new strategies, balancing the scales somewhat. As this one uses standard pieces, upgrading to the full game will be easy. Personally, I'd replace one of the knights with a bishop, to have the full complement of pieces.

Diplomoacy is a game of negotiation, with up to seven players controlling the seven empires in Europe in 1870. None are powerful enough to survive if others turn against them, so alliances are necessary. The game rules are relatively simple, so the game is all about intrigue: it's about the deals you make with the other players, and whether they believe they can trust you. In each round, players go off into corners or other rooms, negotiate, refuse to negotiate, make public gestures, make agreements (verbal or written, open or secret), keep or betray confidences, gether information, sound out rivals, and perform joint military planning. Then they hand the written orders (for their troops) to the adjudicator. All players moves (including any betrayals) are all revealed simultanously, and the outcomes of all movements or conflicts are resolved. No dice are used. Easily the best group board game I've ever played, because of its cleverly psychological nature. It inspired a Chess variant I once designed along similar lines.

There is a neat leaning variant called Quic k Chess.

Yes, I know that, as a computer game, it's strictly not a board game, but Zillions of Games is one of the best generic board game simulators available on the computer, at least for discrete non-math-based, non-card-based games. About 30 games and their variants are included with the default installation and users can modify these files or create their own to create new games. The best part of it is that ZoG has an AI such that you can input the rules of a game and the computer can generally play competently enough to beat you a large amount of the time by brute force. This is an especially excellent program for people who are fond of chess variants and want to see how an invented variant might play out. It allowed me to implement a chess variant I wrote in middle school. ^_^ And showed me that the variant was hideously unbalanced, but that's another matter entirely...