Red Light
Red pieces are frozen, green pieces are free
At the start of each turn some of your pieces lock. Red means frozen, green means available. Your plan has to survive the board deciding which pieces you get.
How it plays
- 1
Set all 32 pieces on their home squares and the game starts itself.
- 2
Every turn a random subset of your pieces glows red and cannot move.
- 3
Green pieces are available as normal. Lift one to see its legal squares.
- 4
If you have no legal green move, the turn passes. In check with no green escape is checkmate.
- 5
During setup, button B cycles the lock ratio from mild to brutal. Button A restarts; button B pauses a game in progress.
What the lights do
Red under frozen pieces, soft green under everything you can still use. Frozen squares light first, one by one, so you see the board decide. Legal squares light green, captures orange-red.
What you'll hear
A chime when the freeze is dealt, the usual lift and move sounds, a buzz if you try a red piece, and a skip tone when a turn has to pass. 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 · based on red_light.ino · on OpenChessCore 1.0.0
More skill modes
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Make it yours
The Code tab has the whole game — 442 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.