Chesses Press Kit

Your pieces slide! Your pieces fall! Your pieces do the strangest things! It’s chesses unlike the chess you normally chess! Bet you can’t chess just one!

Play Chesses (Desktop and Mobile)

The basics

Developer: Pippin Barr
Release: 7 August 2019
Platform: Browser (desktop and mobile)
Code repository: https://github.com/pippinbarr/chesses
Price: $0.00

Who is this Pippin Barr guy?

Pippin is an experimental game developer who has made games about everything from Eurovision to performance art to dystopian post-work futures. He’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montréal. He is also the associate director of the Technoculture, Art, and Games (TAG) Research Centre, which is part of the Milieux Institute for Arts, Culture, and Technology.

Description

Chesses is more or less a continuation of the kind of game design I’ve pursued with games like PONGS, BREAKSOUT, and SNAKISMS, among others. That is, it’s a set of variations on an original game: in this case it’s chess. There are eight variations in the collection (one for each rank on a chessboard or something), each exploring some addition to or subtraction from the original game of chess, whether it’s playing with gravity applied or playing quantum moves that exercise every option at once. Unsurprisingly you can’t really play any of these variations as you would play standard chess, but that’s kind of the fun of it - a chance to play some chess without freaking out about the obscene difficulty it represents.

History

Chesses essentially arose from my interest quite a while ago (like in 2014) in “gravity chess”, which would be played with the board rotated 90 degrees such that when you play a piece out into space it falls to the bottom. In fact, I worked on this for a little while with Tom Curtis, but we ran out of steam somewhere along the way (he was doing all the work, to be fair) and it didn’t materialise. Now that I’m a better programmer than I was, and pretty comfortable with chess programming in JavaScript thanks to previous projects (Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment: Chess Edition and Rogess), I figured I could make a move on it.

I went through a larger set of ideas for chess variants that might be interesting specifically played via a computer (rather than just playing on a chess board), and of course culled some (fare thee well, Mirror Chess, Swaps Chess, and Pawn Chess). Mostly I tried to end up with a set that I think are genuinely somewhat interesting to play - both just to try to understand how to do anything sensible, and then beyond that to try to play “well” in the new version.

Chesses is also another data-point in the ultra-detailed process documentation approach called MDMA. So, if you want to, you can read a lot about the game’s development by reading its process documentation, by going through its commit history, and by reading the research questions.

Technology

Chesses was created in JavaScript using the ever-so-useful chess.js and chessboard.js libraries which together make representing chess (or variants) remarkably straightforward compared to the true nightmare it would be to do from scratch. It also involved a little bit of jQuery and jQuery UI.