I haven't posted here for a while, but I haven't left the chess world.
During my long stint at Exeter Chess Club, Tim Paulden invented a new chess variant called Duck Chess, and we had quite a few informal "chess variants" tournaments that featured it.
Recently, it has started to gain more mainstream recognition as Chess.com has added it to their list of chess variants. Over the past week several of the most prominent chess streamers, including Eric Rosen and Jonathan Schrantz, have picked up on it and tried it out on Chess.com.
Essentially, you make a move and then you place the yellow duck on a square, and the duck serves as a blocker (so for instance if you play 1.e4 with White, and you don't want your opponent playing the Sicilian Defence, 1...c5, you can annoy them by putting the duck on c6 so that they can't move the c-pawn). The technique for how to checkmate opponents in Duck Chess is rather different to the standard game of chess. You can get some nice smothered duck mates with a knight, but if you try to deliver checkmates with the queen, and there's some distance between the queen and king, your opponent can keep blocking with the duck. I remember learning that the hard way a few times when I was down in Exeter, and Eric Rosen found it out starkly towards the end of his game.
Meanwhile, over the past year I've really got into Levy "GothamChess" Rozman's series Guess the Elo, and the latest episode was particularly amusing for the variable quality of the play.
In addition to this I've been actively involved with a Chess.com group called The Unsound Openers, who tend to dabble in a range of gambits from the blatantly unsound to ones that are near the margins of soundness, as well as some offbeat lines like the Borgcloud and the Grob. There's plenty of unorthodox openings around on the YouTube channels of Eric Rosen and Jonathan Schrantz and to a lesser extent GothamChess, who I now follow regularly.
