Enkhbayar's Olympiad Chess: Multi-Board Team Matches

ABOUT OLYMPIAD CHESS

By assigning each player to their own separate chess board known as a realm and connecting them through universally shared middle ranks that act as gateways to other realms, Olympiad Chess takes a fundamentally different approach to multiplayer chess than well-established variants like Free-For-All, Bug-house, or 3/4-player chess.

It is unique because every match, regardless of player count, feels just like the classical chess we all know and fell in love with, while expanding tactical possibilities a hundredfold!

FEATURES

• Unified Multiboard Topology: Experience a brand-new chessboard topology that offers true cooperative team play, seamlessly scalable from 1v1 duels up to 4v4 team matches.

• Olympiad vs. Skirmish Modes: Choose between pure, symmetrical tournaments built strictly to competitive FIDE standards (Olympiad), or dive into sandbox-like, custom game modes for asymmetric matches like 1v2, 1v3, and 2v3 with more punishing time controls and Holdout army feature (Skirmish).

• The Nexus: Take control of the universally shared middle ranks known as the Nexus. Simultaneously pressure or pin down multiple opponents at once, or travel across borders to strategize with allies' and execute coordinated attacks on your opponents.

• Single-player & Multiplayer Support: Host online lobbies to compete with strangers, join public lobbies as a guest, host private matches to invite your friends, or populate offline games with native, in-game bots to practice your skills.

• Chess960 & Fischer Increments: Enjoy the fully integrated official Fischer Random variant (aka Chess960) and Fischer time controls to shape your sessions however you like.

• Integrated gameplay records: Save your matches and access them through the built-in Study Vault menu. A fully interactive replay system allows you to analyze your games, replay moves in chronological order, add notes, toggle favorites, and delete unwanted saves.

ORIGINAL CONCEPTS

Olympiad Chess was built from the ground up over a full year of development, introducing two completely original mechanics to the world of chess:

The Nexus Topology (Born from Gungi. Yes, that Gungi!)

The initial spark for this game came from the multi-tiered 3D piece-stacking mechanics of Gungi (the fictional board game from Hunter x Hunter). Wanting to bring that layered, spatial depth to chess without physically cluttering the squares with stacked pieces, early prototypes stacked the boards instead with "elevator-style" transfer points as a way to travel between different boards.

This ultimately evolved into the Nexus, a physical, universally shared middle zone (Ranks 4 & 5) that seamlessly links all realms arranged horizontally into a single, multi-dimensional chess battlefield.

Holdout Armies (Guerrilla Warfare)

Inspired by the historical Japanese military holdouts of WWII who continued their duty long after the official surrender, this optional feature fundamentally alters how checkmates work in team based, multiplayer chess matches.

In Skirmish Mode only, once you are mated but your team is still in the game, instead of simply vanishing, your pieces will stay on the board as a guerrilla force. During your team's turn, your pieces will automatically execute capture-only moves. If there is more than one capture available, you can jump back in and choose which move to make. This optional feature brings an entirely new layer of tactical depth to your gameplay.

NOTE FROM THE DEVELOPER

Olympiad Chess is my attempt to expand classical chess into a cooperative team sport, offering a true team-versus-team experience without compromising the spirit of classical chess that has been perfected for millennia. I hope you will enjoy my brainchild, share your thoughts with me, and help me see if I was right to spend a full year of my life bringing this to life.