Otherchess is in active beta.
Otherchess is live, and you can now play real, rated games, but the user experience is still evolving and the back end is being upgraded for speed and scale. You should expect rough edges, occasional downtime, and interface changes as the game is refined. If you need a 100% polished product, check back in a couple of months.
You can help us by playing games and reporting anything that goes wrong.
What to expect in beta
- Downtime — The site may go down for maintenance, deployments, or unexpected issues. Partial feature outages (e.g. AI opponents down, ratings temporarily frozen) may happen without warning.
- UI changes — Pages, layouts, and flows will change as we improve things. Nothing is final yet.
- New features — Functionality will be added throughout beta. Expect the app to look and work differently over time.
- Announcements — I'll try to announce significant changes in advance, but don't count on it during rapid development cycles.
Your ratings and game history
I will do my best to preserve your ratings and game history throughout beta. Losing player data without warning is not the plan, and I'll work to migrate data safely across updates.
That said: I can't yet offer the strong guarantees I'll be able to make post-beta. Right now, game history lives in a standard database. I'm actively researching a long-term distributed cryptographic record-keeping solution — so that every completed game generates a verifiable, player-held certificate of outcome that doesn't depend on my server — but that system isn't finished yet. Until it is, your records depend on my infrastructure.
The cryptographic game records project is described in more detail on the Development page.
What "active beta" means day-to-day
- The game is playable. You can play rated games right now. The core rules and move logic are implemented and tested.
- Some features are incomplete. Parts of the UI are placeholder, some planned features aren't built yet, and some flows are awkward. That's normal for beta.
- Bugs exist. We know about some of them. We don't know about others — which is why super tester reports matter.
- The app is evolving fast. A page that looks one way today may look different next week. That's intentional.
How to help: super testers
The highest-leverage thing you can do right now is play games seriously and file clear bug reports. We're looking for people who will:
- Play regularly across different boards and configurations
- Try to break things on purpose — edge cases, unusual moves, long games, rage-quitting, slow connections
- Submit detailed reports when something goes wrong: what happened, what you expected, how to reproduce it
- Flag UX confusion, not just crashes — if something is hard to understand, that's a bug too
Super testers are paid. See the Join the team page for details.
Beta terms of service
By playing during beta you've agreed to the Beta Terms of Service, which covers the key points: the app may have downtime, data may be lost in worst-case scenarios, and features may change. It's written to be readable, not just legally bulletproof.
Reporting problems
Use the Support link at the top of every page to file a bug report or flag something confusing. You don't need a detailed technical description — just tell us what you were doing and what went wrong. Screenshots help.
Community and development
The Community page has information on how to get involved — Patreon, Kickstarter, and the super tester program. The Development page has the current roadmap and what's being prioritized during beta (short version: ops stability and core gameplay reliability come first).