♛ The Queen's Gamble: Chess × Blackjack

A battle of strategy and luck — capture your opponent’s pieces only if you win in blackjack.
It’s checkmate meets 21.

🎯 Inspiration

We wanted to reimagine the classic game of chess by injecting it with chaos, risk, and Vegas-style tension. The result? The Queen's Gamble — a one-of-a-kind mashup that demands not just smart moves but bold bets. No capture is guaranteed. Every move could turn the tables.

🧠 What It Does

The Queen's Gamble is a chess game… with a twist:

• ♟️ When you try to capture an opponent’s piece, you enter a mini-game of blackjack.
• 🃏 Win the hand to complete the capture. Lose, and your piece stays put.
• 💰 Use earned money from victories to buy upgrades and power-ups to sway the odds in your favor.
• 🤖 Battle a built-in AI opponent that thinks ahead and rolls the dice on risky moves.
• 🎨 Enjoy rich visuals, piece dragging, and custom sound effects.

🏗️ How We Built It

Our stack:

• Python + Pygame for graphics, animations, and game logic.
• A fully custom card deck system, hand evaluation, and blackjack UI.
• A lightweight minimax-based AI for making intelligent chess decisions with probability-based capture logic.

🚧 Challenges We Ran Into

• Balancing AI logic: making it smart enough to be fun but also make decisions in a fashionable amount of time
• Integrating two very different game types — chess and blackjack — into a smooth, intuitive experience.
• Timing and event handling for seamless transition between dragging pieces and launching card animations.
• Implementing a dynamic betting system that ties into money management proved to be especially tricky, requiring careful UI design and backend logic.

🏆 Accomplishments We're Proud Of

• A fully playable, glitch-free hybrid of chess and blackjack.
• A clean, animated UI and polished visuals that make the game feel immersive.
• A fun twist on a centuries-old game that keeps players guessing every turn.

📚 What We Learned

• Advanced Pygame techniques for UI layering, animations, and sound.
• AI search strategies like minimax and how to soften them for fun gameplay.
• The power of good UI in elevating a game idea.
• How much fun game dev can be when you add a bit of chaos.

👥 Team

• Brett Suhr
  
• Alex Doehring
  
• Nicholas Holmes
  
• Colin Treanor

Built With

• pygame
• python