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I was unaware any chess variant (or board game of pure skill) was currently more popular than chess globally. I had trouble as it is tracking down the figures for Chinese Chess, Shogi and Go (40 million) that I've seen, aside from FIDE's well-known claim of 600 million adults playing chess.

Regarding the pieces other than K & Q, I see R and B as the two logical sliders to include, as ranks, files and diagonals are natural terms for most people to visualize movements in. The chess N I see as a piece type trying to logically/simply compliment the B, in a way, since it moves to the second closest squares of the opposite colour to which it started on. If it moved to the closest opposite coloured squares, a N would be a weak version of a rook, and not anywhere near in value to a B on 8x8. The latter would also be true if a N were lame like its Chinese Chess counterpart (something I didn't bother to mention in my blog entry). Then there's that a N makes a move that a Q cannot.

Stalemate I wrote a bit about in my blog entry. The main point was that good defence is not punished, whereas often poor prosecution of a winning advantage is punished, aside from all the wonderful draw-saving stalemate combinations that can occur in chess. [edit: For what it's worth, I also mentioned that nice smothered and back rank mates are possible due to the pawns starting on the second rank in chess.]

My blog entry is only meant as a provocative stab at the subject of whether the rules of chess are arbitrary - it seems almost everyone takes for granted that they are. Maybe this might prove the stuff of idle philosophical debate for some, but it may be relevant to grasping what principle(s) might govern any quest for judging/finding or creating a chess variant that proves to be massively popular at some point, if Fergus is right about the rules of chess not being arbitrary, in some sense (thanks to how the game evolved into its modern form, with many largely rejected forms along the way). Regarding other chess variants that may qualify, in my blog entry I was somewhat critical of Circular Chess since for one thing R+K cannot normally mate lone K, but a counterpoint is that at least K+P always beats lone K since stalemate is impossible - an example of how at least some chess variants can compensate for things they may lack compared to chess. It's just how good potential steady players think that the compensation is, assuming they've been exposed to chess itself.