About This Game
This is a real game of chess. The problem is that the pieces are alive. Every piece on the board is a carved animal only pretending to be stone, and hunger slowly brings it back to its natural colors. Feed a hungry animal before its timer runs out or it may abandon the battle entirely.
Choose your side, opponent difficulty and one of eleven scenes, then play with familiar chess rules while keeping an eye on an increasingly inconvenient menagerie. Wild Board makes hunger much more frequent and raises the stakes for neglecting your lion. Chess Alive turns ordinary strategy into a balancing act between checkmate and snack time.
Controls:
Playing
Move a piece — click it, then click where you want it to go. Tap works the same on phone and tablet.
Feed a hungry animal — double-click it, or double-tap on touch. You'll see it start turning its natural colours and a bowl prompt appear over it. Feed it before the timer runs out or it comes fully alive and leaves.
Deselect — press Escape, or click the piece again.
Promote — when your rabbit reaches the far side, a panel asks what it grows into.
Buttons along the top
Opponent — Easy, Medium, or Hard. This sets how well the computer plays and how reliably it remembers to feed its own animals. On Easy it forgets often.
You play — Light or Dark. Switching starts a new board. Light always moves first, so on Dark the opponent opens.
Scene — eleven places to play, from the Enchanted Forest to the Red Planet. Change it any time; the game keeps going.
Wild Board — hunger comes far more often, and a neglected lion will leave for good, which ends the match. For when ordinary chess isn't stressful enough.
Pause — freezes everything. Nothing gets hungry while it's up. Keyboard shortcut: P.
Save to device — saves in this browser, on this device. It won't follow you to your phone. There's a copy-out code if you want to move a game or keep a backup.
New game — asks first, and leaves your save alone.
Every piece on this board is a carved animal, and every one of them is only pretending to be stone. Play a full game of chess against the computer while your army gets hungry underneath you — feed a creature in time and it settles back down, or lose it as it comes fully alive and bolts, defects to the other side, or wanders off into your opponent's pen. Their animals get hungry too, and a computer that forgets to feed its peacock is about to have a very bad turn.