Atomic Chess
Every capture sets off an explosion
Captures detonate. Take a piece and everything on the eight surrounding squares goes with it, including your own pieces. Pawns are the one exception — they only die if they were the piece captured. Catch the enemy king in a blast and you win on the spot, no checkmate needed. Games end fast and rarely the way you expect.
How it plays
- 1
A capture removes the captured piece, the capturing piece, and every piece on the eight adjacent squares.
- 2
Pawns are only removed by an explosion if they were the piece captured.
- 3
You win the moment the opponent's king is caught in a blast — no checkmate needed.
- 4
You may not make a move that blows up your own king, which is also why a king can never capture.
- 5
The kings may stand next to each other here: neither can take the other without dying with it.
- 6
To capture, take the piece you are capturing off the board first. Your own piece is destroyed too, so both go in the box.
- 7
After a blast the board pulses red under every piece the explosion killed. Take them off and play carries on.
What the lights do
The blast radius lights up dull red while the fuse burns down, so you can see exactly what a capture will cost you a beat before it goes off. Then a white-hot shock front rolls out from the capture square and cools to orange and red behind itself. Every piece the blast killed pulses red until it is physically removed; a survivor picked up by mistake pulses amber until it is put back.
What you'll hear
The fuse ticks upward and faster as it burns, then the explosion tumbles down the register with the pitch knocked about so it reads as a bang rather than a note. Everything else — moving, check, promotion, the win — uses the board's standard sounds. Volume is adjustable from the Connect page, all the way down to silent.
What you need
- One board
Runs on
Open Chess Board · ESP32-S3
Built by Concept Bytes · on OpenChessCore 1.0.0
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Make it yours
The Code tab has the whole game — 583 lines of rules, colours, and animations. Everything about the hardware lives in OpenChessCore, so that is all you need to read.
To upload your own version from Arduino IDE, add OpenChessCore.zip as a library, install Adafruit NeoPixel, NimBLE-Arduino, and pick ESP32S3 Dev Module with USB CDC On Boot: Enabled.