Factory Chess

Chess played on the same sixty-four squares as a working factory. Captured pieces leave scrap; pawns mine it, belts haul it, bishops refine it and rooks smelt it into new pieces.

It is still chess

The same board, the same pieces, the same moves, the same checkmate. You could play a whole game and never build anything. But every piece is also a machine, and the board is also a factory floor.

Where the material comes from

Nothing is on the board at the start. Every unit of it comes from a capture: take a piece and its wreckage stays on the square it died on — a pawn leaves one unit, a knight or bishop three, a rook five, a queen nine. The economy cannot open before the war does.

The chain

Pawns and kings stand on a heap and mine it. Belts carry what they dig, one square a turn, and merge where they meet. Bishops and kings cook material one grade higher — scrap to alloy to steel to crucible steel. Rooks and kings smelt the result into new pieces, and choose which way any pawn they mint is facing.

Industry costs ground, not tempo

A turn is one chess move plus as much construction as you like. What limits you is territory — you may build only on squares you are closer to than your opponent — and iron, because a length of belt is drawn as a blueprint and built when a unit of iron reaches it. Advance a piece and the ground behind it becomes buildable. An enemy piece stepping onto a belt crushes it and spills its cargo back onto the board as scrap.

Ways to play

There is a single-player run, where beating a camp grows the board and sends a fresh army in from the new edge, and there are two-player games over a link, hot-seat or across the network. Either player may offer a Productivity Gambit, which — if it is accepted — runs both economies to exhaustion at once and settles the game on what they produced.

Factory Chess is a prototype in the browser, with nothing to install. It is made by Gnarled Helix, and it is under active development — expect rough edges, and please send feedback from inside the game.