One Million Chessboards
A million realtime chessboards that anyone can play on
I made a website. It’s called One Million Chessboards. It has one million chessboards on it.
Moving a piece moves it for everyone, instantly. There are no turns. You can move between boards.
You can play it here.
One Million Chessboards is a follow up to One Million Checkboxes, a surprisingly popular game that I made last year.
It was a little more technically challenging to make! It turns out that there’s a whole lot that goes into running a million simultaneous games of chess.
Unlike One Million Checkboxes, I’ve tried to design this site to handle some degree of load. Although to be honest I have no idea how it’s going to perform (or whether it will get enough traffic for that to matter!). I’ll do a proper writeup of the design once I see how it performs.
There’s a (very short) summary of the details here if you’d like to see them.
Anyway. That’s my new game. I hope you enjoy it.
Awesome game, I've definitely gotten a bit addicted. The structure reminds me a lot of r/place. I've realized you can take advantage of the rule against capturing pieces while moving to a new board to set up impenetrable strongholds, or even surround others as I did here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AnarchyChess/comments/1kdo8kb/does_stockfish_continue_this_line_with_mercy_or/
I really wish there was a turn timer on each piece though. Some people are able to move their pieces so quickly it's essentially impossible to capture them, making all fights other than impenetrable walls silly and kind of pointless, as offense is 100x stronger than defense. Even making each piece wait 3 or 5 seconds between moves would make this whole thing so much more fun to play with.
This is really great and fun - thank you for making it!
I had a great time trying to get an all-white-pieces starting board over at 7668,5586 before tragically realizing kings can't leave their boards.