Planned Release Date: Jan 5, 2027

About This Game

Joker Chess is chess where every move might be a lie. Your opponent sees each of your pieces as an identical Joker — and any Joker can move like any chess piece. Your pawn can charge across the board like a queen. Your king can hide among the pawns. The only question that matters is: is that move real?

Every piece is a Joker

You know what each of your pieces really is. Your opponent doesn't. A Joker can move with the geometry of any chess piece — the knight's jump, the bishop's diagonal, the rook's file — as long as the path is clear. The move has to exist. Who is making it is the secret.

Call the bluff

Before every move you may call your opponent's last action a bluff.

• Caught a lie? The piece is revealed and destroyed, and anything it captured comes back to the board. You keep your move.

• Called it wrong? The piece is revealed as the real thing, your opponent gets a free guess at one of your pieces — and you lose your move.

Accusing costs nothing when you are right, and a whole turn when you are not.

Guess, deduce, remember

Wrongly accused? Point at one of their Jokers and name it. Guess right and it is exposed for the rest of the match. Guess wrong and that type is ruled out — which is information too. The move list keeps every call and every catch, so the whole game is evidence.

Build your secret formation

Before each match, arrange your 16 pieces any way you like across your first two ranks. Put the king on b2. Tuck the queen behind a wall of pawns. Nobody on the other side knows where anything is — and the whole match is them trying to find out.

No check. No checkmate. Just the king.

A match ends when a king is captured, when a king is caught bluffing, or when a clock runs out. Five minutes each for the whole game, and the clock only runs for whoever is deciding.

Ranked, casual and fair

Find an opponent through Steam in seconds. Ranked matches use Glicko-2 ratings across nine tiers, from Pawn to Grandmaster, and feed global, country, friends, weekly, monthly and yearly leaderboards. Casual quick matches and private rooms with a friend never touch your rating.

Every hidden identity is locked in with a cryptographic commitment before the first move and checked on every reveal, so a piece can never quietly change what it is in the middle of a match.

Features

• 1v1 bluffing chess where every piece starts as a Joker

• Call bluffs, make guesses and read your opponent from the move history

• Free formation: set up your 16 pieces your way before every match

• Ranked and casual online matchmaking through Steam

• Private rooms with a friend: a 5-character code or a Steam invite

• Glicko-2 rating with nine tiers, from Pawn to Grandmaster

• Global, country, friends, weekly, monthly and yearly leaderboards

• Practice against the computer on three difficulty levels

• Cryptographic commit-reveal: hidden identities cannot be changed mid-match

• Growing penalties for players who quit ranked matches

• Interface in 16 languages

AI Generated Content Disclosure

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

The game's translation and some visual and marketing elements may have been created with the assistance of AI.