Chess

Toys & Games

Chess boards can be found at the three Festival Grounds. Additional locations were added during The Iron Coast event.

Qalaba'r - 74.5S, 22.0E (2)
Rithwic - 10.3N, 53.7E (2)
Yanshi - 12.7S, 43.0E (2)
Holtburg - 42.1N, 32.2E & 41.0N, 33.8E
Shoushi - 35.2S, 74.7E & 33.5S, 71.0E
Yaraq - 21.6S, 0.1E & 20.3S, 2.3W

To begin a game, double click the board. One set of pieces will spawn and you'll get a message that you are waiting for another player to join you.

To join a game, select and use the game board.
Attempting to join game, please wait...
You have joined the game, waiting for all players to be ready.

As you use the chess panel on you inventory screen to make your moves, the Drudges and Mosswarts battle the game out right in front of you! The Drudge Queen is quite a treat to watch as she wings off a spell to decimate her opponent!

When the game is over, a local broadcast announces the name of the winner along with the chess rating of the two players.

Vaca Muertas(1259) has defeated Bettis(1200)!

Once you have a high enough ranking (rumored to be 1800), you can make a Chess Flag using one of the stamps that can be purchased from any of the three furniture makers. (See Flag quest.)

Cragstone - 24.6N, 47.1E
Hebian-to - 39.4S, 82.8E
Zaikhal - 13.2N, 0.3E

Those of you familiar with the musical Chess will recognize that a few of the Town Crier sayings for the month are a tribute to the song, One Night in Bangkok!

Town Crier tells you, "Go to the festival grounds to see a show with everything but Ulgrim."

Town Crier tells you, "Time flies, doesn't seem a minute since the Lytelthorpe bar had some townsfolk in it."

Town Crier tells you, "Don't you know that playing at this level calls for no ordinary venue, it's Rithwic, Qalaba'r or... or... Yanshi."

Town Crier tells you, "Festival Grounds look much like each other when your head is down over your pieces brother."

(A link about the musical if you'd like to know a little more: Chess: A Note from Tim Rice)

For those of you interested in how Chess made it into AC, here is a post that Sean Huxter made on the Vault:

Sean_Huxter
Date Posted: 10/16 7:50am
Subject: RE: Shall we play a game ? How about a nice game of chess ?

Actually, this has nothing to do with Harry Potter. The way some people post, you'd think J.K. Rowling invented Chess.

This addition is the culmination of about 5 years of wishing, hoping and finally doing.

Probably over 5 years ago we wanted to add games to AC. But the sheer amount of coding required made it unfeasible.

So the artists sat around one day coming up with ways to play Chess without extra coding. How could it be done?

Well, the first step was making chess boards and pieces. There are certain Empyrean floor structures on the map that were designed originally as chess boards. I'm not sure if the real chess board was ever added in-game, though. But it has existed in data for years.

The current model, though, is a version I created to work with the current chess system.

So we thought of making chess pieces available at vendors. You could buy a full set and go set up a game on these Empyrean ruined floors and you could manually play a game.

But it was completely griefable. There would be nothing stopping someone from taking your pieces. Except burden. We thought if we made them real heavy no one would want to run off with them.

Anyway, when it came down to it, we really needed game code to make it work and we had no programmers available to do any work other than scheduled, needed work.

We never did add the pieces, because there was no point... not if we couldn't make the thing work.

So years go by, and at just about every meeting the question of Chess would come up.

Todd came on board and I think he was here about fourteen milliseconds before he started working on Chess. Planning for it anyway.

Chess was a labor of love for Todd. He worked on it in his spare time. A lot. All the while, making improvements in server code, making requested changes, and just doing his job. Chess was his hobby.

We watched for months as it got better and better. Soon you could actually click on a board and drudges would show up. Later, those drudges moved. All through keyboard commands.

Recently he added the UI, and implemented some of Chess' more subtle, obscure rules.

Then he implemented an actual standard chess ranking system.

And this month, you can finally see it.

Whew! That's all I can say.

Sean.

For information on the USCF Rating System click here.