♔ THE KING'S GAME: THROUGH THE VEIL IS OUT NOW ♔
The King's Game: Through the Veil is now loose upon the world, having survived closed beta the way most things survive anything: through the patient labor of people willing to break it repeatedly so you wouldn't have to.
Chess, as practiced by the whole of civilized humanity since some bored Persian invented it, has always rested on a peculiar assumption that both parties ought to know everything happening on the board. I have dispensed with it. Every piece now hides in the dark until one of your own units stumbles across it. In much the same way a man discovers his house has termites only after moving in.
Even the machine you're playing against has been relieved of its omniscience. It keeps a belief board, that it has its own private guesswork about where your pieces have gotten to. It does not know where you are. It is finding out, same as you.
Three Ways to Lose Track of Your Own Army
David's Duel Eight by eight board, all the old rules intact. The pieces moving as they've always moved. The only innovation being that most of them are now invisible to you. You may face the machine, or you may go online and face another human being, independently, from their own machine, in their own home, each of you equally blind and equally certain you're not.
The Council borrows it's board shape from a 6th-century Byzantine variant, which is to say it has been confusing people for roughly fourteen hundred years and shows no sign of stopping. Three families all occupy a circular board of five rings, all racing toward the same bullseye at the center, in the fine tradition of every family gathering that has ever ended in a shouting match over inheritance. Online, for up to three players, each independent, each equally unaware of what the other two are plotting.
The Thronoi takes the whole apparatus and forces it onto a hexagon. Based on Glinski's rules, three bishops and nine pawns per side, no castling, no en passant. With the hexagon apparently having no patience for either convenience. Also live online, two players, independent of one another, each blind in a slightly more geometrically interesting way than the other modes allow
On the Matter of Fog, of Which There Are Three Kinds
The Veil, in which fog is merely inconvenient and the enemy king remains visible, out of what we can only assume is professional courtesy between monarchs.
The Abyss, in which fog is total, no courtesies extended to anyone, and any piece you manage to spot stays visible to you alone. a small private truth in a game otherwise built entirely of rumor.
Apokalypsis, which turns the fog off entirely, restoring chess to its original, fully-lit. It is recommended for beginners, purists, and anyone who has simply had enough of not knowing things.
The AI Opponent, Ranked by Ambition
The AI comes in three temperaments. The Peasant has tactics but no plan, rather like most people's Fridays. The Knight has both tactics and a plan, and pursues it with the single-mindedness of a man who has found a parking spot he intends to keep. The Emperor adjusts its ambitions by the phase of the game, activating its king only once the danger of doing so has mostly passed, which is either wisdom or cowardice, and history has never fully settled which.
None of this was borrowed from an existing chess engine, which would have assumed perfect knowledge of the board and been, for our purposes, useless. This one was built from nothing, specifically to not know things, which turns out to have been the harder engineering problem.
Spectators, and the Question of Who Gets to Cheat
Online lobbies include an observer slot, for those who would rather watch two blind men fumble than be one themselves. Observers see everything, which places them in roughly the position of a biographer: fully informed, entirely uninvolved, and somehow still not the one anybody listens to.
Our thanks to everyone who spent the closed beta finding the game's faults before the public could. Which includes the small matter of that the AI could not win a single game against anyone. That has been corrected. It plays fairly now. It may even beat you, which is either good news or bad news depending on how the last paragraph struck you.
The store page is live. The board is dark. Go find out what's on it