Chess Wars

We're in the final stretch of development on Chess Wars, our in-house take on the oldest strategy game in the world — and we wanted to share where things stand before it's out the door.

The pitch

Chess Wars is chess. Real chess — legal moves, check and checkmate, castling, en passant, promotion, the works. But every piece on the board is a squad, not a token. Move your knight and you're not sliding a little horse icon across a grid; you're commanding a unit of horse-riders that gallops, forms up, and fights its way onto the target square. Every capture is a skirmish.

Underneath the spectacle is a strict rules engine that doesn't bend for the sake of a cool animation. The battles are a consequence of the chess move, never a replacement for it. If you know how to play chess, you already know how to play Chess Wars.

What a "move" actually looks like

Each square is its own miniature battlefield. When a piece attacks or defends a square, it doesn't just sit there statically — it garrisons soldiers on every square it controls. A king rings all eight adjacent squares with guards. A queen sends her forces out in all eight directions. Pawns post sentries on their diagonal capture squares. Units path around each other, engage in melee, or open fire with ranged attacks if they're bishops, rooks, or queens.

The board itself fights back, too — mountains, lava fields, weak forts, and other terrain hazards are scattered across specific squares, changing how a fight over that piece of territory plays out.

And if a pawn survives the gauntlet all the way to the far rank, it doesn't just flip into a new piece — it visibly mutates into something bigger and stranger. As one of our level scripts puts it: "Behold my magnificent, terrifying new form!"

A game with a personality

We didn't want this to just be "chess with soldiers" — we wanted it to have a voice. Across 50+ handcrafted puzzle levels spanning six chapters, the game leans into a dark, comedic tone: the king is "the hat-wearer," the queen is "the Matriarch," rooks are "bricks," bishops are "creeping priests," and pawns are just "the little ones" — right up until they aren't anymore.

Alongside the puzzle content, Chess Wars ships with a few different ways to play:

• Puzzle mode — solve handcrafted positions with AI replies powered by Lichess's tablebase.
• Sandbox mode — scripted "find the winning line" challenges.
• Playback mode — watch real PGN games play out move by move, complete with opening names.
• Live mode — connect your Lichess account and play real games, with moves synced through the Lichess Board API.

That Lichess integration is a bigger deal than it might sound — it means the AI you're up against in puzzle mode is backed by tablebase-perfect endgame knowledge, and the games you replay or play live are grounded in the real chess ecosystem, not something we faked in-house.

Where you'll be able to play it

Chess Wars runs in the browser, built with Unity and delivered via WebGL embedded in a React front end. Most of our recent work has actually been in that last mile: build pipeline hardening, Brotli compression to keep load times down, and ironing out the Lichess login flow (OAuth redirect fixes, PKCE handling) so the connected features just work.

Where we're at

The core is done. The chess engine is solid, the squad-combat visualization is fun to watch, the level content is written and playable, and Lichess connectivity is wired up end to end. What's left is polish — build size, load performance, and login reliability — the unglamorous work that makes the difference between "it works on my machine" and "it works."

We're close. More soon.

— The Chess Wars team, Tomorrow Media