Chess is a thinking person’s game — quite literally. Time systems vary, but most give players plenty of time to think about each move before making it. That results in a game that can progress at a very slow pace and the resulting boredom is probably why most people don’t play chess. But what if chess were faster? What if you didn’t have to wait for your opponent to take a turn at all? That’s exactly what Xander Naumenko of the From Scratch YouTube channel accomplished with his reinvention of chess into a fast-paced real-time strategy game.
In this new version of chess, each player can move their pieces whenever they want. They don’t have to wait for their turn, because there are no turns. If both players want to move their queens to D5 at the same time, then it just comes down to whichever person can make the move first. To keep that from devolving into a chaotic slap fight, every piece has its own independent cooldown timer. If you just moved your queen, then you’ll have to wait for that cooldown timer to expire before you can move it again.
To keep unscrupulous players from cheating, Naumenko had to build a chess board that would enforce the rules. That board has an electromagnet underneath every square that can lock the piece above and prevent a player from moving it while it is still in its cooldown period. RGB LEDs on the squares indicate whether or not a piece is on cooldown, with the number of lit LEDs giving a rough approximation of the time remaining.
The board uses a Teensy 4.1 to control power to the electromagnets, the colors of the LEDs, and tracks the positions of the pieces. That tracking is important, because the board needs to know if a piece has moved in order to start the cooldown and it needs to know which player is touching a piece. The latter is necessary to let a player capture a piece, even if it is still on cooldown.
That detection and tracking is particularly interesting, as Naumenko’s solution is very novel. Each player wears a wristband that sends a weak voltage through their body and into any metal piece that they touch, which the board can detect. It differentiates one player from the other by looking at the frequency of the electrical signal, which is unique to each wristband. That allows for a safe voltage level, but one that is still recognizable even as resistance varies.
The game, which Naumenko demonstrates at the end of the video, looks like a lot of fun. It is hectic in the best possible way and the rule changes give seasoned players a new challenge, which results in more novice players having a fighting chance they wouldn’t normally get with your grandpa’s chess rules.
