Chesses 2 Press Kit

You’ve chessed! You’ve chessesed! But have you chesses2ed?! You haven’t?! Game on! Peer through the fog of war! Go through the cycle of death and rebirth! Experience the hottest new XR app in town!

Play Chesses 2 (Desktop and Mobile)

The basics

Developer: Pippin Barr
Release: 1 April 2020
Platform: Browser (desktop and mobile)
Code repository: https://github.com/pippinbarr/chesses2
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 2 is a sequel to my previous game Chesses, as you might imagine. It’s a further set of eight variations on the standard game of chess, comprising everything from the addition of a “fog of war” to pieces that change sides each move to game of chess that create drawings.

I think it’s important to note that chess is a game with a huge history of variations and at least two of the variants presented here are ideas others have had. Notably, there are multiple versions of chess with a “fog of war”, including Dark Chess (invented in 1989) and Fog of War Chess (no date). As far as I can tell, other versions don’t implement the precise rules I settled on for visibility - in particular I allow every piece to see the adjacent squares, and I also tune visibility by the number of pieces that can see a square for visual effect. Similarly, chess variants based on checkers already exit, such as Chesskers and Chessers. Again, the version presented here as CHECK-RS seems to use a significantly different rule set. There’s room for everyone!

History

I started Chesses 2 almost entirely because I was stuck on another project (v r 4) and, in the midst of the madness of a COVID-19 world, I needed something “straightforward” to work on and get some traction with. Making variations is generally my favourite design and development exercise because it lets me focus mostly on ideas and less on extremes of detail and implementation. That’s not to say there weren’t complexities in implementing the ideas (or indeed ideas that failed utterly), but it’s a nice headspace to just do something without worrying too much.

As with Chesses, I pretty much just sat down and tried to come up with a few ways of representing chess, going through rejected ideas for the first game, and coming up with new approaches. In this iteration I think I favoured a balance of easy-to-get joke games that were simple to make (3D chess, anyone?) alongside more complex reinterpretations that took work but may actually lead to interesting play (CHECK-RS chess is a nice example of this I suspect).

Chesses 2 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 and by going through its commit history.

Technology

Chesses 2 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 involves some jQuery and jQuery UI. The sound stuff in musical chess uses the lovely sound library Pizzicato.js. The drawing in LeWitt chess uses p5.js.