Atomic chess

Atomic chess is a chess variant played under the standard rules of chess with one major exception: every capture triggers an explosion that removes the capturing piece, the captured piece and every other piece of either color standing on an adjacent square, with pawns alone immune to the blast. This single rule change transforms chess strategy, since a well-placed capture can clear an opponent's king from the board even when the capturing piece itself is destroyed in the process, and players must constantly weigh whether a capture is safe to make at all. The variant originated in Germany in 1995, when a player collected the rules from friends who played it informally offline and introduced it to the German Internet Chess Server. It later spread to other online chess platforms, including the Internet Chess Club in 2000, the Free Internet Chess Server in 2003 and Lichess in 2015, where it remains a popular variant today.