Gambit

I stopped playing chess online because of a number. Not a bad number particularly, just a number, sitting next to my name and moving down whenever I played badly. Once it was there, opening the app stopped being a thing I fancied doing and became a small risk I was choosing to take on a Tuesday evening.

Brands like Kith keep making beautiful physical chess sets, the sort of object you leave out on a table on purpose. Nobody makes the software version. There are a thousand chess apps and they are all built like instruments, all rating graphs and tournament grey. They are made for people who already play seriously, and they are relentless about telling you exactly how much worse you are than the number beside your name.

What it is

A chess set first and a chess program second.

The pieces are carved from frosted glass and lit like an object rather than drawn like a diagram. The board sits in the middle of the screen with nothing around it.

The machine plays you properly, and afterwards it tells you what happened. Not with an evaluation bar, but in sentences, naming the move that lost it and what you had not seen. Same engine everyone uses, pointed at the question people actually have after losing, which is not what the centipawn swing was but where it went wrong.

What I was stubborn about

No rating, anywhere. It is not shown to you and not kept behind your back either. The moment a number attaches to a person the object becomes a scoreboard and playing becomes a risk. Removing it is the single biggest design decision here and everything else follows from it.

You get to lose properly. It never interrupts or greys out the bad squares. The explanation arrives afterwards, when you have asked for it.

It is a link. No install, no account. That caps the rendering budget hard, which is most of the reason the glass looks the way it does. Everything goes on the pieces and the light and nothing on interface around them.

Beautiful before you move. The screen you see when nothing has happened yet is the one that decides whether you play at all. Most chess software is designed for the middle of a game. This one is designed for the moment before it starts.

Open questions

I do not know whether removing the rating removes the reason to come back. The number I disliked is also the thing that makes people play four games instead of one, and I have deliberately taken it out without putting anything in its place yet. Ask me in six months whether that was taste or self-sabotage.