ChessPlay

Chapter 1 · The three people who should probably be asleep

We are three programmers from China. When we started the team, we were in different grades of middle school: Xy in Grade 8, Andy in Grade 7, and wei in Grade 9. On paper, that's exactly the kind of group that should be doing homework, arguing with alarm clocks, and getting shouted at for having phones under the desk at 11 PM. In reality, at 11 PM we were usually facing each other across a phone and a computer screen — three people awake at the same unreasonable hour, sending messages and pictures back and forth on WeChat while debugging a webpage together.

Our names are Xy, wei, and Andy — those are all pseudonyms, and if you met any of us in real life you would just see ordinary students with schoolbags that are too heavy. But on the internet, we are a small software studio with strong opinions, shaky budgets, and a habit of starting projects at midnight.

There is a natural food chain in a three-person team. Andy opens the game by dropping a wild idea into our WeChat group at 11:47 PM — sometimes as a sentence, sometimes just a screenshot of something he found online. Xy, our main developer, then builds it, breaks it, rebuilds it, and around 2 AM declares it "basically finished." wei, the oldest and co-developer, reads the code at breakfast, removes the three lines that would have caused an international incident, and says things like "have we tested this on a phone?" (We had not. We never had.)

None of us is the boss. Our management structure is: whoever is most awake at the moment makes the decision. This has occasionally resulted in features being written at 1 AM that none of us remembers approving, but overall it has worked surprisingly well — teenagers are very good at disagreeing, and even better at continuing the conversation ten minutes later like nothing happened.

Chapter 2 · The mysterious number 169

Every team needs a name. Most teams are named after wolves, storms, or Greek letters. We named ourselves after a math problem, which is a pretty good summary of our sense of humor.

One boring evening, someone wrote into the chat: 91 minus 78 equals 13. Then someone else, who clearly should have been doing their math homework, continued: 13 squared equals 169. We stared at it for a moment. A difference that turns into a square. Small numbers, neatly packed, no remainder. It felt like a sign, or at least like a much better team name than "The Three Keyboard Guys."

And that is how Team 169 was born. There is no deeper meaning, and we refuse to make one up. We just liked the fact that the math was clean, which is more than we can say for 90% of our code. The number 169 also looks great in group names, commit messages, and dramatic announcements. We like to think it means "small starting point, squared output," which is exactly what a three-person team of students should do.

Chapter 3 · How we met without ever meeting

People sometimes ask which classroom we meet in. The answer is: none of them. We have never met in person. We don't live in the same city, we don't attend the same school, and we're not even in the same grade. The three of us met online, in the way that three people who write code always seem to find each other eventually — one person posts a question, another person answers it, and the third one shows up with a completely different opinion and a screenshot.

Friendships in school are usually built on shared desks, lunch tables, and being late to the same class. Ours was built on shared bug reports. Instead of passing notes, we passed error messages. Instead of hanging out after school, we stayed up late facing each other across a phone and a computer, trading messages and screenshots in a WeChat group — plus the tiny chat rooms that we ourselves had built. It's a strange kind of friendship, but it's real: when your code is broken at midnight and the only person who can explain it is a kid two provinces away, you get close very quickly.

We have never shaken hands. But we have fixed each other's bugs at 1 AM. That's the same thing, in our generation.

We talk about programming, of course — the way other people talk about football. But we also talk about games. About exams. About teachers who don't understand why a homework needs to be "uploaded as a PDF named exactly like this." About terrible mobile phone keyboards, the weather, what we'd buy if we ever had money, and whether the new update of a game was secretly designed by someone who hates happiness. We're friends first and a company second, which is probably why the company still exists.

Chapter 4 · Our earlier crimes against web development

ChessPlay was not our first project. It is simply the first project that survived long enough to get its own website. Before ChessPlay, there were two legendary experiments.

The first was the Anonymous Chat Room. As the name suggests, it was a webpage where anyone could walk in, pick a temporary name, and talk to strangers. We built it because we thought the existing options were either bloated, creepy, or covered in advertisements that followed you to every other website. Ours was simple: a box, a text field, and zero accounts. The day it went online, we sat in the room by ourselves for about twenty minutes like three nervous hosts at a party nobody attended. Then one person came in. Then two. Then somebody typed a joke and three strangers laughed at it on the other side of the country, and we looked at each other across the chat and knew we were onto something.

Running an anonymous chat room is an education. We learned that people will, without any training, (a) be incredibly kind, (b) test whether the input field accepts emoji of unusual sizes, or (c) ask if the server is run by "a company." It was not run by a company. It was run by three children who were supposed to be asleep. We never told anyone.

The second was the Toolbox. Every programmer eventually builds a toolbox website, the same way every cook eventually burns something. It was a single page of small utilities we wished we had: text converters, generators, little calculators, weird helpers that solved one exact problem in our own homework. It was ugly, it was useful, and we used it ourselves every single day — which, by the way, is the most reliable test of whether a product is worth keeping: do the people who made it actually use it? We did. Our toolbox tabs stayed open on all three of our phones, like a toolbox with a broken lock that you can't close.

Those two projects taught us the important lessons that tutorials don't teach. We learned that real users click buttons in the wrong order. We learned that mobile browsers are small and opinionated. We learned that a feature nobody asked for is just a bug with confidence. And we learned that a tiny team, if it ships fast and listens to the people actually using the thing, can sometimes outrun teams with fifty times our budget.

Chapter 5 · Why chess, and why now

Chess came for us one at a time. One of us was dragged into a school chess club and lost forty games in a row to an eighth-grader with an unreadable expression. Another found chess on a phone during a long, boring holiday. The third got obsessed after watching a game where a queen was sacrificed to force a checkmate six moves later, and spent the entire weekend trying to do the same thing to the AI — mostly failing, occasionally succeeding, and then pretending it was intentional.

We liked the existing chess apps, but we kept hitting the same walls. Either they wanted us to download a giant app, create an account, sit through a rating system, and watch an advertisement before every move; or they felt like a stadium when what we wanted was a small table with a friend. We wanted to send a friend a six-letter code and be playing in ten seconds. We wanted blitz games, slow games, and even correspondence games where you have 72 hours per move and can think while pretending to listen in class. We wanted an AI that never gets tired. And, because we are not normal, we also wanted a mode where everybody in the room can move for the side to move — we called it Mass Chess, and it is exactly as chaotic as it sounds.

So we decided to build exactly the site we wanted to use. This is a luxury students have: nobody asked us for a business plan, so we didn't write one.

Chapter 6 · The build, or: why our sleep schedules filed a complaint

Building a chess game looks simple from the outside. It is a board with sixty-four squares and some pieces that move in predictable ways. It is not simple. A chess engine is a small universe of edge cases with opinions. We had to teach the computer about castling — including kingside, queenside, the rook having moved, the king passing through check, and the square being attacked. We had to teach it en passant, the one rule that every single chess player forgets and then gets upset about. We had to teach pawns promotion, which means a small front-line soldier reaching the last rank can become a queen, rook, bishop, or knight. We built move legality, check detection, checkmate detection, and the little move notation (1. e4 e5 2. Qh5…) that looks like a foreign language until you learn it, at which point it looks like a foreign language you can read.

The online side was harder. We didn't have a big backend, but we had a public shared data layer on the hosting platform, and we engineered the whole room around it. Moves are appended like chat messages, and every client independently replays the same rules to rebuild the same game. If two people click at the same time, the first correct move wins; nobody's board gets silently overwritten. Rooms, moves, and chat each live in their own little collection, and when a game ends, the room, the chat, and everything about the match are deleted automatically — nothing lingers on the server.

We made the board refresh twice a second so that your opponent's move appears almost before you finish complaining about it. The built-in chat refreshes the same way, which is how we discovered that a tiny message box is often more fun than the game itself. We wrote an AI with two levels: Easy is a generous opponent who sometimes doesn't notice the queen sitting in front of it; Normal is a calm, three-ply thinker that will punish you quietly. When the AI is in a clearly lost position, or when the board is too dead to win, it even offers a draw instead of forcing anything. And there are no forced draws in ChessPlay — a game ends by checkmate, resignation, flag fall, or a draw that both sides actually agree to, with a "Draw 🤝" button sitting right next to "Resign 🏳️."

There were bugs, of course. There were beautiful bugs. At one point, both players' pieces rendered in dark color on mobile, so every pawn looked like a shadow. The chat room once refused to accept messages because the interface was being rebuilt every half-second and the send button was destroyed literally while you were tapping it. We fixed both. The first bug taught us how mobile browsers render symbols; the second bug taught us that you should never destroy the thing the user is currently typing in, which is life advice we should probably print on a poster.

Chapter 7 · October 19, 2026 — the day the server went live

On October 19, 2026, we stopped calling it a draft and officially opened the server. It was a Sunday. The three of us were online at the same time, in three different rooms, staring at the same small webpage. We created a room, sent the code through our own chat, sat in the two seats, and played the first complete official game. Halfway through, one of us blundered a rook and tried to blame the network. The network was innocent.

We'd like to tell you there was a glamorous launch party. There was no party. There was a moment of silence, a few nervous refreshes, and then the realization that nobody was going to walk in unless we actually told people. So we told friends, our chat rooms, and the weird corners of the internet where chess players gather. And people came. Some played a quick game at lunch and left; others stayed, opened rooms, and taught strangers how the knight moves. Every time a new room appeared, the three of us watched it like three kids watching a small fire we had started — proud, nervous, and ready to run for water.

Chapter 8 · What we believe, in exactly three sentences

First: a game should respect the player — no accounts forced on you, no dark patterns, no advertisement before your move.

Second: simple beats smart. A six-letter code is a small invention, but it makes ChessPlay feel like sharing a table instead of visiting a stadium.

Third: finished games are deleted, not hoarded. We are not here to collect your data; we are here to let you play a game and move on with your day.

We build websites for the kind of people we are: students, players, strangers on the internet who are curious about what three kids can ship.

Chapter 9 · What's next

Homework comes first. We are, unfortunately, still students. Somewhere between exams and reviews, we plan to keep polishing ChessPlay — better timing options, nicer end screens, and the small refinements you only notice once hundreds of real people have clicked the wrong button. We also have ideas for new games, and the Anonymous Chat Room and Toolbox are still alive and waiting their turn. Team 169 doesn't move fast because we're organized; we move fast because we're stubborn and we genuinely enjoy it.

We can't promise you'll always win. We can't promise the AI will go easy on you — Normal is, frankly, a little ruthless. We can't even promise that Andy will stop sending ideas at 1 AM. But we can promise that the site will stay simple, free, and ours.

Chapter 10 · Thank you, and your move

To everyone who played a game, sent a bug report, opened a room for a friend, or just sat in the chat saying hello: thank you. A three-person team with no office, no budget, and no meeting times can only build a community because real people show up — and you did.

The board is set. The button is yellow, it is in the bottom-right corner, and it says Play Now. Six letters are waiting for you. Whether you're a future grandmaster, a player who can't remember the knight's moves, or someone who just wants to see what a few students from China made on a Sunday — you're welcome at the table.

Checkmate, or a friendly draw. Your choice.

— Xy · wei · Andy, Team 169
Launched October 19, 2026