Chess Mafia

Chessmafia Cover

Inspiration

My inspiration for Chess Mafia was two-fold:

Personally, chess has always played a large role in my life. I started playing chess at age 5, played competitively for the US for over a 10+ years. Since retiring, I started a non-profit (Girls To Grandmasters) geared towards getting more girls playing chess & subsequently into STEM fields. Building chess on blockchain felt like a no brainer.

From a product perspective, Chess is the most popular game in the world with 605MM players. Soccer which is the second most popular game has 265MM players. Chess on Solana is the perfect onramp to not only onboard more users to the Sol ecosystem but to do so in a fun, healthy and low cost fashion.

What it does

Currently, Chess Mafia is a site where one can play chess for sol and buy NFT skins to customize board/pieces. Super Simple.

How we built it

We were late to the hackathon and had about two weeks to build. I had never built anything using rust & my solidity knowledge is very rudimentary. I partnered up with Seranged@ (anon dev) and Max Bosch (design) to figure out how to build this thing from scratch. Over the last ten days we drafted a PRD, Design doc, roadmap for MVP and started chipping away.

Challenges we ran into

We ran into a lot of challenges:

Learning while building...none of us are shadowy super coder blockchain devs.
Figuring out the right sized MVP for the hackathon given late start.
Integrating Phantom Wallet across site led to some hiccups.
Implementing websocket/devops required to enable human vs human chess was a huge headache.
Writing the contract was a challenge...given no background in rust. PaulX escrow contract...needed to pull in another teammate.
Integrating Stardust or Metaplex to enable NFTs on platform (WIP).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

MVP: We shipped a product that works e2e albeit game not on chain (payment contract WIP hoping to get done).
Teamwork: Everyone stepped up to the plate and hustled. Right reasons, respect etc.
Product: Chess Mafia has been well received and users seem genuinely excited by the prospect. -Demo: Demo video encapsulates our vision super tightly.

What we learned

The importance of the core team's values ie. building for the RIGHT reasons.
Zoom out and don't try to reinvent the wheel; leverage opensource code.
Stay humble, start with a small, ship MVP, iterate.
User feedback... why is this always underestimated?
Don't build in a silo. The Solana community is powerful, comprised of good people. Ask the community questions.

What's next for Chess Mafia

Fix things we broke trying to push this out.
Enable more than 1 v 1 games.
Enable chess on chain actually where the board state is encoded, disburse funds trustlessly (check win provisions etc.).
Enable on chain player stats.
Collect user feedback on MVP.
Add player page with game history & game review.
Enable playing for NFTs not just Sol.
Launch NFTs on site via Stardust (pieces, games etc).
Enable 'viewability' so that high profile matches can be watched by community.
Enable tournaments x launch a tournament for the community.
'Play to earn' could be a really interesting concept.