My study of the variety of chess variants led me, of course, to dabble in creating my own. The Gathering . From that question almost immediately came Hecatomb. Start with a standard chessboard. Place the kings in their normal starting positions.
Hecatomb plays quickly, but with a fair amount of tactical depth.
After some preliminary capturing, almost every move is a check, which pleases my inner patzer and keeps the tension level high. If you want to try it out, there's a free Hecatomb module available for Zillions of Games . Some time later, I was reading David Pritchard's wonderful The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants when I realized that one of the things I liked about Hecatomb is its simplicity. But it could be more elegant than it is. First to go was stalemates.