Back when Kasparov was battling the computers and they covered at least some of it on NOVA, chess had a chance of becoming a spectator sport. Of course it took the guys in the other room analyzing his moves while he stared at the board to have it mean much to the average non-serious player. And even then it probabaly whooshed many would-be fans.
Nowadays it’s all I can do to check in occasionally at The Week In Chess, since hardly anything has much mass appeal.
They would need some form of battle chess. Remember the old game where you would play regular chess but you would go into a mini game when one piece attempted to capture another? Weaker pieces would have handicaps so for instance a fight between a knight and a queen would be pretty much in the queens favors unless the guy playing the knight was a great figher.
“Battlechess” was a standard computer chess game, only the captures were jazzed up with silly cartoons. A knight capturing another knight would show a Monty Python-esque encounter with the loser getting his limbs hacked off one by one. The rules of capture were identical to the standard game.
The mini-game where the two pieces would square off for battle (with the weaker piece usually losing) was a feature of an old Apple game, Archon, which I still play occasionally on an emulator. The pieces weren’t standard chessmen, though the chess influence was obvious. My most lopsided victory was killing a dragon with a knight, the equivalent of a Green Beret wrestling a Sherman tank to the ground.