CLASSIC GAMES
Open a table, place the board, and play chess the way you would across a kitchen table — you move the pieces yourself, and you and your opponent call the rules between you.
Ready to play
The timeless strategy game of Chess! This mod includes everything you need to play a traditional game of chess with a friend, featuring a clean, classic design that feels right at home.
The board is eight squares by eight, turned so each player has a light square in their right-hand corner. Set the back rank out from the corners inwards: rook, knight, bishop, then queen and king — the queen goes on her own colour, so the light queen starts on a light square. Fill the whole second rank with pawns.
Light moves first, then play alternates. There is no time limit unless you agree one.
Rooks move any distance in straight lines, bishops any distance diagonally, and the queen does both. The knight jumps in an L — two squares one way and one square across — and is the only piece that can leap over others. The king moves one square in any direction.
Pawns move one square forward, or two from their starting rank, but capture one square diagonally. A pawn reaching the far rank promotes, almost always to a queen. Two special moves round it out: castling, where the king steps two squares toward an unmoved rook and the rook hops over it, and en passant, where a pawn that has just made a two-square jump can be captured as though it had only moved one.
Attacking the enemy king is check; the defender must answer it immediately. If there is no legal answer it is checkmate and the game ends. A game is drawn by stalemate (no legal move but not in check), by agreement, by threefold repetition, or when neither side has enough material to mate.
Because nothing stops you. Chess960, a handicap where one side plays a rook down, atomic chess, a four-player free-for-all with two boards pushed together — the table does not know or care which variant you are playing, so house rules cost you nothing but the agreement to use them.
Shots marked “the real table” are captures of DiceyTable running this pack. The rest is the pack’s own promotional artwork — it is lovely, and it is not what the renderer draws.
DiceyTable gives you the physical game — the board, the pieces and real 3D physics — not a rules engine. Nobody's move is validated and no illegal move is blocked, so house rules and variants cost you nothing. It runs in the browser with nothing to install, it is free, and you share a link to bring people in.
Building a set by hand is the alternative, not the requirement — the pack above is already laid out. Either way every player needs a free account, and there is nothing to download on any device.
The rules are still yours to enforce, with the pack or without it. The rest of this list is about building a set from the built-in library — the Chess pack ships its own board.
Open the pack, invite your group with a link, and start playing. Free, in the browser, with nothing to install.