Chess. It’s one of those infuriating games for me. I enjoy it, but truth-be-told, I’m just no good at memorisation. So, no matter how I try I can’t memorise all those opening moves that everyone uses. It’s that same memory problem that plagues me later in the game, too. It prevents me from seeing multiple moves ahead. I think in the decades I’ve played chess, I can count on one hand the number of times I have won against a quality opponent (I’m not counting playing against my younger sister - she’s worse than I am at chess).
So, to combat this, I evened the field a bit by randomising the backrow of the White side and then mirroring that for the black side. Although I still lost, I had more fun playing than I have in twenty-plus years. I highly encourage taking this outline I’ll present here and using it as a springboard for yourself and your chess games.
What we did:
We set the pawns on the board in their correct (historically speaking) positions for both black & white.
We then set up the black and white rows in the row directly in front of the pawns.
Now the fun begins. We used a six-sided die (it’s what we had - I recommend an eight-sided die) and rolled it once for each White piece starting with the Queen-side Rook and working down the line in order.
In our example, I threw a two for the White Queen’s Rook. Counting empty spaces from the far left of the White home row, I placed the Rook on the former White Queen’s Knight space. We then mirrored that placement for the Black Queen’s Rook.
For the second throw, I rolled a five. Again, counting only the empty spaces, this places the White Queen’s Knight on the traditional White King’s Bishop square.
The third throw (for the Queen’s Bishop) was another five. So, we moved the Queen’s Bishop to the King’s Knight square to take up residence. The board was starting to look very interesting.
The fourth throw, for the Queen herself, was a four. Remember, we are only counting blank spaces, so the Queen ended up on the King’s square. Talk about an usurpation! 
Now for the King. We rolled a six. While counting empty spaces, we ran out of spaces before getting to six. In fact, there were only four empty spaces left. So, when we got to the end, we started over at the Queen’s Rook square with five. The sixth empty square is the Queen’s Bishop’s square. That’s where we placed the King. Quite interesting.
We’re nearly there, only three more pieces to go. A four was thrown for the King’s Bishop. Counting again from left to right only the empty spaces and continuing again from the left when we run out of spaces, we find that the fourth empty space in that sequence is the Queen’s Rook’s square. Well, that places both bishops on the same colour. This’ll certainly make for an interesting game, especially since the Queen is on the same colour.
Two pieces left. First up, the King’s Knight…and a six is rolled! This will place the King’s Knight on the King’s Rook square which of course, will place the King’s Rook on the final remaining square - the Queen’s square!
And, there you have it - A Storm-Tossed chess board ready for play.
We also played with a couple of variations on this. The first alteration we made was to not mirror the sides. Instead, we rolled the die once for each piece for both the White & the Black sides. This made for some truly intersting and, truthfully, volatile games. The second alteration we made, which I personally did not care for but I present here in a full-disclosure effort, was to allow the player to choose to begin counting from either the King-side or the Queen-side. I found that this gave too much latitude to the experienced player thus giving them a much greater advantage. I preferred the more pure randomness of the setup.
However you play it, just play it. Chess is one of the oldest games in existence for a reason.
(Bill Fields deserves credit for the name)
Cheers.
~KR
Ludo Ergo Sum
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Hey nice site. Anyways chess tips. To become good one must learn from ones one mistakes And successes. Chess analysis pro 7000 I found very useful in helping my chess development. I’d recommend it. Next keep the pressure on. And learn to hold the tension on the board instead of running out of tension with no advantage gained.