Chess Game on Blockchain — Near Protocol

I was researching Near Protocol and accidentally found Chess. I decided to write a short article about it, as that was the first time I played chess on the blockchain.

To play the game you need Near account, you will log in with it and will make transactions. Every move — is a transaction.

You can find the Chess game here

https://near.org/chess-game.near/widget/ChessGameLobby

There is “Replay recently finished games:” section and there you can find the previous games and you can replay them. For example, you can see my game:

ID: 92853144

Player White: cryptotexty.near

Player Black: AI (Medium)

cryptotexty.near is my account on NEAR (feel free to send me some $NEAR or tokens). I played White and I selected a Medium level of AI. Actually, on the medium level, the AI wasn’t playing very well — it did certain mistakes and it was easy for me to win. So if you are a good chess player — probably it’s better to select a higher level.

You need to write each of your moves (i.e. — “e2e4”) and submit it as the transaction and then confirm with your wallet. This doesn’t require much time or cost and blockchain here provides transparency. So you can see all of my moves on the blockchain, and even if this app would cease to exist — it’s possible to restore the game, and how it was played using an ordinary chess board.

That’s an example of a transaction:

https://explorer.near.org/transactions/4N4qYi93E9U8Kh13o3htc5D6WS66YE8aEtw5c4cEMHhr

{ “game_id”: [ 92853144, “cryptotexty.near”, null ],a “mv”: “f7f8” }

Where “f7f8” is my last step in that particular game, where I ended the game with a mate.

It seems this app can have potential, especially taking to account the rise of “Play-to-earn” games. So let’s imagine that people can play with AI and earn some tokens, but also players can play among each other and risk their funds. Anyway, it looks much more interesting than casino and anyway chess is an interesting game.