Construct Chess

Construct Chess is real chess with real presence: a full 3D board you sit over in VR or AR, running straight in your browser. No app, no account, no setup: open the page and you're at the table. Stockfish, the strongest open-source chess engine in the world, provides the opposition, so the board is honest whether you're rated 800 or 2000.

What the headset adds isn't gimmick, it's space. The board has scale and depth: you lean over it, read diagonals the way you'd read them across a physical table, and pieces occupy the squares they threaten. In AR passthrough the board sits in your actual room, chess on the coffee table or your desk. It's the closest a browser gets to the over-the-board feeling, and it quietly changes how you calculate.

All the real rules are here: castling, en passant, pawn promotion, the works. The game enforces legal moves, so it's also a forgiving place to learn chess properly. New to the game? Each side starts with sixteen pieces, each type moves differently, and the goal is to checkmate the enemy king by trapping it with no legal escape. Everything past that one sentence, the board itself will teach you.

How to Play

Pick up a piece and set it on its destination square, controller trigger or hand pinch in VR, mouse on desktop and touch on mobile. Illegal moves simply won't be accepted and special moves (castling, en passant, promotion) trigger naturally when you pick up or select the piece you want to move.

Tips

• Walk the board. Standing up and viewing from behind your opponent's position is a genuinely useful blunder-check. Threats you miss from your side are obvious from theirs.
• Use the engine as a sparring partner, not a judge. Lost positions against Stockfish are lessons: play them out and watch how you perform.
• Develop, castle, then attack. Knights and bishops out, king safe, rooks connected: the oldest advice in chess survives because it works in VR too.

Credits

Developed by Florian Isikci (@SrileXR).

Based on a Chess project by schowdhuri. It uses Stockfish for enemy AI.