A fast-paced 5×6 chess variant. Capture the king to win.
Play it: qckchs.com
- 5 files × 6 ranks, 30 squares total. Every game is close-quarters.
- Capture the king to win. No check, no checkmate. Leaving your king en prise is legal — your opponent has to actually take it.
- Shuffled back rank. Both sides start with the same Fisher-Yates permutation. Every game is a new opening.
- Pure byoyomi clock. 120 one-second periods. Move within 1s and the period resets free; slower burns one. Run out of periods and you lose. The clock never goes up.
- Standard piece movement otherwise — minus castling, en passant, and the two-square pawn opening. Pawns auto-queen on the back rank.
Draws on threefold repetition, 50-ply no-progress, and insufficient material.
Open qckchs.com, pick a name (and then backup key if desired), hit "new game" or "vs bot". Share the game link to invite an opponent, or get matched into a public game. Drag pieces. Don't think too long.
- Server: Odin, single-threaded over Mongoose. Game state lives in memory; SQLite is an async write-through sink.
- Frontend: server-rendered Mustache + Datastar over SSE. No SPA, no build step on the client.
- Engine ("mimir"): alpha-beta with TT, killers, LMR, quiescence. Plays via either a handcrafted evaluator or a small NNUE (360 → 128 → 1). Trained offline from self-play data.
Requires Odin 2026-05 + normal dev essentials.
bin/setup # retrieve dependencies
bin/dev # run server at localhost:8022