[icco]

Man, I played this back in high school when I was on the chess team. It promotes such a different level of thought than normal chess, but when you get a teammate who literally starts taking pieces so you can place them and vice-versa, it gets insane.

I think the real benefit of this game is that it teaches you to read chess boards quickly. If you get good, you can glance at your opponents board and get a quick idea of things you can do in a few moves to help them.

[hansy]

When I was new to the game, a quick-and-dirty strategy I was taught was to figure out which board had the better strategic positioning within the first 15 moves. Then, the player whose board was not the "good" board, would assume a turtle role and play defense, all while capturing pieces for his teammate.

Although strangely enough, I recalled the turtle board winning the game more often than the board that was appraised with a higher chance of winning.

[DiabloD3]

I came here to say exactly this. Bughouse is crazy fun when you have a teammate who is brutal.

I wonder why no one has implemented Bughouse as a massively popular webapp, I'd love to play that again.

Edit: Huh, apparently Bughouse is still 1v1, the 2v2 variant is called Crazyhouse. We never called it that back then, weird.

[koopajah]

According to wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crazyhouse) Crazyhouse is a 1v1 version of Bughouse. They say 2 players opposed to 4 players, not 2 players by team.