Chess like games: Alternative victory condition to check mate

The only other option that I could think of is: Getting a second queen. Thus players needed to focus into stopping all those pawns.
A variation to that is 3 rooks, knights or bishops.

Another victory condition is, destroy your opponent completely.

But I think you are in search for something more sophisticated than those suggestions. Right?

I was also going to suggest the possibility of controlling certain areas like FrankM mentioned.

Also, capture-the-flag comes to mind, but that may be too complicated.

You could also introduce some kind of resource mechanic. Possibly as a victory condition, or as a cost for certain moves/abilities by some pieces, or both. Though you increasingly start to get away from the Chess similarity in such scenarios.

Some games, like go, use area control as a way to score points, so you might capture territories.

Some abstracts use capturing pieces (multiple) as a way to score. So first person to capture 5 pieces or whatever is appropriate for your game.

Some use moving a specific piece to a specific location. Onitama, you win either by capturing your opponent's master or by moving your master to the opponents starting space.

Another thing that could be considered is a time limit. What you could do is assign points to each piece as has been suggested, but in addition there can be a time limit. THis can be preset to whatever time you want.

Not only could you attempt to score more points in the amount of time provided, but you could do something where fallen pieces regenerate after so much time has passed. They could regenerate at their original starting position or something long those lines.

Thus, the longer the game goes, the more chances you have to take high valued pieces multiple times. Granted, the longer the game goes, the more vulnerable you are unless you have good defense and you can prevent them from being taken.

It sounds fun to me- actually I kind of want to play it now.

-MAR

I want to make at most 40 unique pieces and one thing I thought to increase possible permutation is to have different movement and capture pattern. But considering all pieces behave differently, it could become confusing to know the movement of all pieces on the board.

One thing The Duke does really well is reduce learning time for pieces by including the way each piece moves as part of the component. That way you don't have to memorize abstract patterns:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/36235/duke

Here's a good image of what their pieces look like: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UeaatV2v54E/maxresdefault.jpg

Those are pretty big to have on the board. But maybe each type of piece in play has a cheat-sheet tile that the player keeps displayed. That way everyone can see that, for example, an Archer moves one space orthogonally but captures any number of spaces diagonally.