About this site
Five games, twenty-seven rule sets, no charge, and no account needed to start.
Updated
What this is
This is a place to play the chess family and the tafl family online. That means standard chess and seven of its variants, Chinese chess in two rule sets, Korean chess in two, Japanese chess in nine including the handicap ladder and the five-by-five game, and six of the Norse tafl games.
You can play another person, play the computer, or put two people in front of one screen. You can play as a guest without giving us anything at all. If you later want a rating that follows you around, you can turn that guest account into a real one without losing the games you already played.
Why so many rule sets
Most sites pick one version of a game and call it the game. That is a reasonable thing to do and it is not what we wanted. Shatranj is not a worse chess; it is a different game with its own endgame theory. The Korean point-count rule is not a footnote; it changes what a drawn-looking position is worth. Fetlar and Copenhagen hnefatafl are close enough to look identical and different enough that a strong player of one will lose to a weaker player of the other.
So every rule set here is a first-class citizen. Each one has its own page saying exactly what it does, each one is played by an engine configured from the same rule file the page describes, and most have their own rating pool so a result means something.
About the writing
Every word of the rules, history and teaching pages on this site was written for this site. Nothing is copied from an encyclopaedia or a rule book. Where a page rests on published scholarship — Murray on the mediaeval game, Linnaeus on tablut, the federation rule books for the modern Asian games — the source is named on the page and described in our own words.
Where the historical record simply does not say, we write that it does not say. Two of the rule sets here, chaturanga and Ard Rí, are reconstructions rather than recorded games. Their pages say so at the top, and they say where the reconstructions disagree with each other.
If you find an error — a rule stated wrongly, a date that is off, a claim that is stronger than the evidence — we would rather hear about it than not.
Who runs it
Motebo Technologies, in South Africa. The same deployment also answers on a handful of other domains, one per game, so that a player who only cares about shogi can have a shogi site. They share one set of accounts, ratings and games.
The games themselves belong to nobody. They are hundreds of years old and no one owns them. What we built is the place to play them.