♟️ Chess
Complete chess in your browser, with a five-minute clock per side and an engine that plays seriously. Full rules, including castling, en passant, promotion and every draw condition.
- 2 players
- Table game
- In your browser, free
- With friends or against bots
The rules are the rules
This is not a simplified version. It is all implemented:
- Castling with all three conditions (king and rook unmoved, path clear, and the king unable to start, pass through or land on an attacked square).
- En passant, with its one-move window.
- Promotion with a choice of piece.
- Stalemate — a king with no legal move and not in check is a draw, not a loss.
- Fifty-move rule, threefold repetition and insufficient material.
The rules engine was verified against known position counts to a depth of four moves, across four standard test positions — the method the computer-chess community uses precisely because it catches errors in castling, en passant, promotion and pinned pieces.
The clock exists for a practical reason
It is five minutes per side. Chess without a clock does not end — and in a persistent room like the ones here, somebody walking away from their computer would lock their opponent's seat forever. The clock is what guarantees every match finishes.
The bot plays properly
It is a minimax search with alpha-beta pruning and piece-square tables — not a random move generator wearing an opponent's costume. And chess was the first game on the site to genuinely use the room's difficulty setting:
- Easy — looks one move ahead and makes deliberate mistakes now and then.
- Normal — looks deeper and does not hand pieces away.
- Hard — three moves ahead, with positional evaluation.
There is a node ceiling on the search, and it is a deliberate decision: the server runs on a single core shared by every room, and a reasonable move in 80 milliseconds is worth more than the perfect move freezing other people's matches.
The pieces are our own drawings
They are custom vectors, geometric and flat — not the font glyphs most sites use. A font glyph changes shape on every system and disappears in a dark theme without an outline that thickens differently in each browser.
The drawing did not come from an existing set either: the best-known ones carry viral licences, which would force the whole site to change licence. Two shape decisions came from looking at the board at real size: the king got a crenellated crown because a smooth dome read as a mushroom and got confused with the bishop, and the bishop's mitre slit was widened because it vanished at 26 pixels — which is the size of a square on a phone.
The table
The board is seen from the point of view of whoever is sitting at it: the surface recedes and your opponent is smaller, on the far side. The tilt is deliberately slight — a steeply tilted board turns the back rank into a strip and you stop being able to count squares.
Pieces slide to their destination square instead of appearing on it. That is not decoration: it is the information about where the piece came from, which is exactly what you lose by glancing away for a second.
More table games on Arcade Zone
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🟠 Draughts
Draughts in the Brazilian kitchen-table dialect: a man captures forwards only, and whoever declines a capture can have the piece huffed off the board.
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♠️ Poker
Texas Hold'em with play-money chips, eight hands and rising blinds. No wagering of value: chips start equal, exist only inside the match and never become a prize.
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🎴 Neon Cycle
Discard by matching colour or symbol until your hand is empty. Penalties stack, the Prism changes the colour, and the Mirror sends the whole bill back to whoever sent it.