Question about chess variant

I was wondering if there is already a chess variant where, before starting the actual match, each opponent in turn places one of his/her pieces in his/her half of the board, and then after the placement the game starts with the usual rules.

This would be a bit like chess960 but with the starting position generated by each player in turn piece after piece.

Since chess is essentially the simulation of an ancient battle, this could be interpreted as the placement of each unit before the start of said battle. An astute general (or King/Queen!) could gain a significant advantage by placing his/her pieces in certain ways.

Maybe it already exists, there are so many chess variants and I only know a few.

Yes, this is most commonly known as Placement Chess. It was promoted by David Bronstein. You can play it on pychess. See - https://www.pychess.org/variants/placement

Thanks jezzat!

I didn't know about it, I just had a quick game with a bot on pychess.

This looks exaxtly like chess960 without the randomness, I was thinking about a more "extreme" version, where you can decide where to place the pawns too, and you can plce any piece anywhere on your side of the board, so much so that the first move by white could even be a capture!

It could be very "messy" but as long as it balanced maybe this variant could work.

We have Fairy-Stockfish user defined variants now! See https://www.pychess.org/blogs/@/gbtami/create-your-own-variants/cL0m9kzc

I created it here https://www.pychess.org/variants/screen

Thanks gbtami!

I couldn't even imagine that such a thing existed!