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The draw-by-repetition rule does a good job of keeping players from sliding a tile back and forth repeatedly, but the tiles definitely introduce some weird en passant and castling edge cases.
Transcript:
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Source: https://xkcd.com/3139/
There would need to be two missing 2x2 board pieces for symmetry.
Chess is already asymmetric since white moves first, so it's not necessarily a problem for the starting position to also be asymmetric. Though I wonder which would be the best starting position for the empty square, on white's side or black's?
I'd think that having an empty 2x2 right in front of any of your pieces would limit your options for moving pieces. So I would put it in front of White, not in the middle, but on one of the edges. Also, White would not be allowed to shift the tile on their first turn, since that would just put the disadvantage on Black, who would shift a tile, yada yada. Maybe ... maybe you would only be allowed to shift a tile if you didn't shift a tile on your previous turn.
Another thing - would Queens, Bishops, Rooks be able to "jump" the empty space to cross from one side of an empty 2x2? I'm thinking yes.
I think the answer to that question will be clear once you play test it
You'd probably want both varients, though I suspect being able to block a queen attack by moving a tile would bring more tatically nuance.
Wouldn't be hard to build a paper board and play on that.
I'm going to put on together once I have time See how that goes, I don't have anyone to trial it against though but I'll put a Lemmy post up about it
Maybe instead of starting with a hole, one player gets to choose which 2x2 to remove? It would have to be early on to ensure there is always a few empty 2x2s to choose from.
So maybe black chooses the 2x2 to remove and then white makes their first move. That way black gets a bit of an advantage since white moves first.