Chess is one of the oldest and the most complex game of all. It has also regained in popularity over the last couple of years with the success of the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit and the rise of popular streamers and Youtubers like Gotham Chess or the American Grand Master Hikaru Nakamura. But we yet have to see a successful chess game on the blockchain. Could Immortal Game be the first one? Let’s have a deeper look at the challenges and how the team is trying to solve them.
Many chess players, like myself, spend countless hours playing online on the big online platforms such as chess.com or lichess.org. These platforms are great for playing and practicing against opponents from all over the world. Players are ranked by their ELO score, just like in traditional, over the board chess tournaments. But as a pay-to-earn and NFT gaming enthusiast I am still looking to this day for a decent chess platform using blockchain technology.
A couple of projects tried already, but none of them have been successful so far. Powchess for instance offers a lichess clone with a blockchain layer. Players are matched up against each other depending on their level the amount of token at stake for each game. Winner takes it all. A nice idea in principle, but after just a couple of months, the platform seem to be abandoned by players… We will see why in the next section.
The well known development studio Vulcan Forged also have a blockchain chess game: Battle Chess. Vulcan’s Battle Chess is a 3D chess game where players are matched against each others… The thing is, I have never been able to play against anyone as there are no players in the lobby. The 3D aspect is also more distracting than anything else and there are no clear play-to-earn mechanics.
The challenges of play-to-earn chess
There are two main challenges for blockchain chess games. The first one is that it needs to attract a large player base. Without players of all levels, you won’t be able to find an opponent and you will just abandon the game and go back to the big online chess platforms. Earnings could be a great incentive to onboard players, but it has to be done the right way, and this, because of one major problem: the use of chess engines.
Over the last years, chess engines have become very powerful and are now able to easily beat any player, even the reigning and five times world champion Magnus Carlsen. When playing online, a player can just open a chess engine on another window and play the games suggested by the computer, thus beating any opponent. Platforms like chess.com are spending a lot of resources to fight against cheating. Part of the solution is AI driven, comparing the players’ accuracy against computer moves. They also have an in-house fair play team that will review specific cases reported by users.
So if players cheat in online games with no real stakes on the line, imagine…
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