I realized while going through some rules to help liven up my tavern that Dungeons & Dragons has quite a few game sets with no rules. For some reason me and my players favor Dragonchess so I created the following easy to use fun to play rules to add to your sessions! Please leave a comment if you have any cool idea's for mini games or stuff to add to this!

Dragonchess:

Players take turns playing a more complicated chess, involving a immovable dragon hoard piece at their end of the table, players strategize to take the opponents hoard whilst defending their own.

The game can have as many rounds to win as the DM chooses and each round consists of players taking an action as follows before making an Intelligence check against their opponent.

As DM don’t inform players when another attempts to take an action (unless they are playing against NPCs or if you’re playing tabletop and can’t) only inform the players how to roll after they decide their actions

Cheat: roll a sleight of hand check against your opponents passive perception, if you beat it gain +3 to your next intelligence check (only for the purpose of the game) For a more interesting game swap the +3 for the players slight of hand modifier (cap at +5)

Deceive: roll a deception check against your opponent to attempt to influence their action by misleading them, on a successful roll give them disadvantage on their next intelligence check (if they have advantage on it they roll regularly, if they have a modifier from cheating or other it is applied to both rolls) 

Predict: roll an insight check to attempt to predict your opponent's next action, if you roll higher than your opponents last intelligence check gain advantage on your next intelligence check

If a player is proficient in Dragonchess they gain +1 to all of their intelligence checks during the game and can choose one action to hone into their signature move, once during a game they may automatically succeed on making the chosen action.

Advanced Play

Instead of making intelligence checks after your action of choice, choose one of the following move styles (i.e. player takes Deceive and then uses "Bold Move" as their intelligence check) no action except for Casual Play may be taken twice in a row.

Casual Play: Make your intelligence check as usual with modifiers from your and your opponents actions

Bold Move: Add +4 to your intelligence check by making a risky offensive move, however your careless defense allows your opponent advantage on the following rounds roll (player gets +4 for that check and on the next their opponent gains advantage)

Defensive Positions: otherwise known as biding for time; gain +8 to your intelligence check however you cannot gain a point if you win the roll

As an FYI, Dragonchess does have an official ruleset - it was written by Gary Gygax and published in Issue 100 of Dragon Magazine back in 1985. Wikipedia even has an entire article on it.

Those rules, of course, are how to actually play the underlying game - not run it within a D&D table.  Your rules for checks seem like a perfectly serviceable way to add some d20 mechanics to resolve a game of Dragonchess played within the campaign itself.  You might want to consider changing the flavor to match the official Dragonchess rules (as opposed to the treasure pile version you came up with)… but, frankly?  You probably do not even need to do that - Gygax’s Dragonchess is a pretty awful game that would not really be the kind of thing a tavern or adventurer would have easily at hand. 

Quote from Caerwyn_Glyndwr >>

As an FYI, Dragonchess does have an official ruleset - it was written by Gary Gygax and published in Issue 100 of Dragon Magazine back in 1985. Wikipedia even has an entire article on it.

 Oooooo, thank you Caerwyn_Glyndwr, I'll bookmark this link :)

Huh I didn't know that! The scheme of the game could be changed to be more accurate so thanks for the suggestion! My goal with this was to make it something simple to run within the game that won't take up too much time but is still an enjoyable experience.

Dragonchess (like actual chess) has the issue of being a perfect information game (both players know the entire board state), which mostly makes cheating impossible (other than getting advice from a better player) and deception extremely difficult. To add an interesting psychological element, you typically want one (or both) of two things

• Imperfect information (common to card games where you only know your own hand, but occurs in a few board games, such as Stratego).
• Multiplayer games with no fixed alliances (Risk, Diplomacy)

I chose sleight of hand against passive perception because it essentially hints to your opponent not realizing the move is illegal because of how you move your hand, as for deception I guess it could be seen more like trying to deceive or persuade your opponent into making a bad move