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I understand your aim, but I wonder if the Spartan piece design you presented here can achieve it. It will be very hard to break people's preconception that you are playing normal Chess. They will always try to map whatever pieces you have on orthodox pieces, no matter how strange they are. If you have many of them they will assume they are normal Pawns, even if they were as different from Staunton Pawns as draughts chips.

I would have expected them to perceive it as unusual that there are two black Kings, though. If not, when they ask why you leave your King in check, the answer 'because even if he takes it I still have another one' (pointing out the other one) should satisfactorily explain it! :-)))

I would expect it to work better when you would put a sign explaining the Spartan pieces next to the board (with pictures of them,and how they move), below the text 'Spartan Pieces' in large lettering. (There is no need to fully explain the rules; the only purpose is tomake it clear at a glance that pieces are involved that move differently.) Then they will realize it is a variant before they actually look at the board position, as the sign attracts more attention. I think that should prevent them from feeling tricked. Of course the majority of Chess players will still pull down a curtain in front of their face as soon as they are realizing they are looking at a variant, so they might never take a look at the board at all. But it is pointless to target this group anyway.

I hardly ever play Chess myself. (Why would I, if I can delegate it to my computer?)The past 25 years I have done maybe 3 games of normal Chess, 2 games of the unspeakable 10x8 variant on a server that crashed before the game ended, and some 20 games of Superchess in the Dutch championship for that. (Because I worked together with the organizer / inventor of that in making Fairy-Max play it, I felt that I could not refuse to participate.) And 2 games of Shogi against a computer at moron level in the plane backfrom Japan. So I made the pieces mainly for display. But who knows...? Too bad San Diego is a long way from Amsterdam. (Although I did visit it once, attending a physics conference.)