- Shipped
- September 8, 2026 at 2:48 AM UTC
- Author
- Kamo
- Commit
- af5891c
The pane you get when chess has no opponent yet was the SaaS-card kit: an icon in a rounded square, two tab-cards, two segmented rows, a button. It looked like a settings dialog for a feature whose whole point is that it is a game. The hero is now a real game. Anderssen–Kieseritzky, London 1851 — the Immortal Game, in which white gives up both rooks and the queen and mates with three minor pieces — plays itself a move at a time behind the choices, on the member's own board scheme, so the pane is also a preview of the board they are about to play on. Reduced motion rests it on the final mating position. so the browser still owns no chess logic. All 43 moves resolved as legal through that generator, which is a small independent check on it — a hole in it could not have produced this game. The palette is the object's own. A tournament roll-up board is dark green and buff and a chess clock has brass trim, so the chrome is board lacquer, aged ivory and brass, and the board keeps whatever scheme the member chose. Strength is three pips rather than a number, because a number would be a rating claim this engine cannot honestly make. Three things a browser decided, not a preference: - The backdrop had to be a WHOLE board anchored to the bottom. Fitting it letterboxed it into a strip; covering the pane cropped a tall window so hard that four files filled the screen and the game read as an abstract pattern. - Header and CTA are fixed and only the choices scroll. One scroller around the column put the primary action below the fold at every size this window can be. - The backdrop draws no rank and file labels. Behind the words they are not navigation, they are debris. It opens on Computer rather than on nothing: the empty state was mostly emptiness, and that is also the honest default, since playing the computer needs nothing from anybody else.