Conveyor Chess

Inspiration

Borna was 3D printing chess pieces............... but then Alex thought: what if there were conveyor belts on the board????

What it does

Conveyor belt chess follows all the standard rules of chess. But in this variant, the players are additionally able to select a file (in chess, a file is a column of squares) and pull the pieces on that file towards themself on a given move, as if the entire file was a conveyer belt. They can keep pulling the pieces until one of them falls off. This gameplay mechanic can lead to many new chess strategies. You can pull your opponent's king towards your side of the board to put them in danger. You can intentionally empty a file so that your opponent's pieces can't occupy it. You can even checkmate your opponent with a pulling move. Now, you can play conveyor chess with your friends in the virtual garden!

How we built it

At first, we were going to create all the chess game logic from scratch. But since our variant of chess is just standard chess with an extra move ability, we were able to leverage the chess.js library in order to take care of all the standard game rules.

The frontend is built with THREE.js.

Challenges we ran into

After working on our individual components, the main challenge was the integration between the function and the form of the application. It turned out that we had even been using transposed rows and columns from each other in all of our calculations. Many hours were spent on fixing bugs like this, because sleep is necessary for avoiding bugs, but sleep we did not.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

ITS ALIVE AND IT WORKS

What we learned

Never trust a matrix

What's next for Conveyor Chess

We want to release a more polished version of this for public use.

Built With

• chess.js
• node.js
• three.js
• websockets