Chessplosion

Chess. And whoever captures gets to throw.

Chess is a solved problem — there are a thousand apps for it, and most differ only in the board. So Chessplosion has a second mode that tilts the game without touching the rules: capture a piece and you may throw it back onto the board from your own edge, in the same turn. Whatever topples is captured. Yours included.

The artillery mode

The captured piece becomes the projectile — right now or never. There is no ammo store: skip the throw and you lose the right to it. That's deliberate, otherwise whoever is ahead hoards projectiles and the game tips for good.

You throw from well behind your own back rank, not from the board's edge. That's exactly where the difficulty comes from: the same small angular error grows across the distance into a big miss at the target. Dragging sets direction and power, releasing throws. The camera swings behind the thrower so the release point and the board fit into one frame.

No friendly-fire protection. Your own pieces topple just as easily. That's the built-in brake: whoever leads gets more ammunition but risks their own position with every throw. Toppled means captured — tilted more than 45° or knocked off the board. Everything else slides back onto its square. A toppled king ends the game.

Three difficulty levels that actually change something

The difference isn't a number, it's how much you get to see. Easy: the full arc, free power per throw. Normal: half the arc, and the power oscillates so you have to hit the moment. Hard: only the release direction, faster oscillation — plus crosswind up to ±2.6 that you have to account for before you let go.

Or just chess

The mode is a switch, not an obligation. Off means complete chess with all the rules — castling, en passant, promotion, draw rules. Plus a main menu, pause, saved games, replays and settings. Play two people on one device or against the AI.

An opponent that can throw, too

The AI opponent is homegrown — deliberately not an off-the-shelf engine, because Stockfish and the Lichess components are GPL and collide with App Store terms. Instead: a custom alpha-beta search with piece-square tables in three strengths. At the lower levels it misses on purpose now and then — that feels more human than an engine making the same mistake every time. And among equally good moves it picks at random, otherwise every game plays out identically.

For throwing it doesn't simulate physics. It sweeps angle and power, computes the landing point ballistically — crosswind included — and scores it by who is standing nearby: enemy pieces count positive, its own negative and with a premium. Friendly fire hits it just as hard.

On the device, not in the cloud

No account, no sign-in, no server. The game, your saves and the replays live on your device, and the AI thinks locally. Chessplosion works on a plane exactly as it does at home.

Pieces made of code

Pawn, rook, bishop, queen and king are lathed from a profile curve; the knight is an extruded silhouette on a turned column — generated procedurally, no bought models. A new piece theme is therefore a material swap, not another download.

Version 1.0 for the Mac

The macOS build is here to download — signed and notarised by Apple. Windows, iOS and Android follow; the game itself is the same on all four, only the shell around it differs.

The downloaded build tells you when a newer one exists. It asks balane.app for the current version number once at launch and shows a note in the main menu — nothing else, no account, no measurement.