Chess, played as a war
When Kings Fall turns every chess game into a battle you can watch. Each piece is a living warrior: the armies march onto the board, insult each other, fight every capture as a duel and fall when they are taken. The rules are the real rules of chess - nothing more, nothing less.
What you can do here
- Play against the computer - eight levels powered by Stockfish, from about 400 to about 2800 Elo, with real clocks, a rating that follows you, and a battle report after every game.
- Watch legendary games - twenty of the most famous games in history, from the Immortal Game of 1851 to Kasparov's Immortal of 1999, replayed move by move like a film, with commentary and analysis.
- Learn - fifty-four lessons: how every piece moves, the classic checkmate patterns, tactics, endgames against Stockfish and the main openings.
- Follow real tournaments - what the world's best players are playing right now, with live data from Lichess broadcasts.
The armies
Two armies of six warriors each fight on the board: the Light - the Sun King, the Queen of Light, the High Priestess, the Solar Knight, the Bastion Warden and the Golden Valkyries - and the Shadow - the Tyrant King, the Crimson Empress, the Violet Bishop, the Crimson Knightmare, the Iron Valkyrie and the Crimson Legionnaires. Every warrior has its own voice, its own attacks and its own way of falling.
How it is made
The game runs entirely in your browser (WebGL, three.js). The opponent is Stockfish, the strongest open-source chess engine, running locally on your device under the GPLv3 licence. The moves of the legendary games are historical public records and were checked move by move. The characters' voices and the commentators of our videos are synthetic voices (AI text-to-speech); the commentators are fictional characters.
Credits
- Chess engine: Stockfish 17.1 (GPLv3) - licence, source at github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish
- Rules: chess.js · 3D: three.js · Tournament data: Lichess open API
- Fonts: Cinzel, Cinzel Decorative and Inter (SIL Open Font License, via Google Fonts)
Questions or ideas? Write to us.