Coming soon

About This Game

An arcade cabinet where you learn chess — and then play it. Real chess, unchanged: against the computer, against friends, or alone.

LEARN CHESS BY PLAYING IT

The first time you start the game, it asks how well you already know chess and drops you in right where you belong. Complete beginners get eighteen lessons where no rule is simply explained — every rule is played.

THE JOURNEY

A map of 105 stops instead of a list of lessons. Two continents are open: eight opening regions, where each line is first shown, then tested, and finally put into practice; and the endgames, ranging from basic rook endings all the way to the Lucena position.

Beyond the final milestone waits THE ADVENTURE — a run through a branching route, played out instead of simply solved.

ARCADE

12,067 tactical positions. Each one has a move that decides it, and a time limit calculated from the position itself.

You have three crowns, and between rounds you choose from three tactical themes. The more accurately you play, the louder the arcade cabinet gets.

AGAINST THE COMPUTER AND FRIENDS

Eight opponents rated from 600 to 2000, whose weaknesses are built in rather than simply dialed down. Each level has its own budget of inaccuracies, mistakes, and blunders.

Play standard chess or Chess960 — against the machine, or against a friend you invite through the Steam Overlay.

AND MORE

Post-game analysis and PGN export for every match. Eighteen music tracks generated by the game itself. Pieces and boards to unlock, board effects that can be reduced or disabled in three levels, and full support for English and German.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

CHESS: ARCADE uses generative AI for its 2D artwork and for its music.

The illustrated assets — move callouts, effect overlays, chess piece sets, UI plates, the title graphic and the game icon — were generated with GPT Image 2 from prompts we wrote and iterated on ourselves. Every generated image then goes through our own import pipeline (trim, alpha normalisation, correction onto the game's fixed palette, downscale), is reviewed in the running game by hand, and is reworked or discarded when it misses. All of it ships as fixed image files inside the build.

The soundtrack was composed with generative AI: the melodies, harmony and arrangements were written with AI assistance, then reviewed, edited and mixed by hand. The game ships no audio files and uses no AI audio model — the score exists as note data that the game's own synthesiser renders procedurally at first launch. Twelve of the tracks are arrangements of public-domain classical themes; the rest are original.

Nothing is generated while you play, and the game never connects to an AI service. The opponent is a classical alpha-beta chess engine with a hand-written evaluation and opening book, and the puzzles come from the public Lichess puzzle database, verified against that engine. No player input, game data or personal data is ever sent to an AI model.