I'm Barry, I go by Willpwr — ALPHAKNIGHT when I'm on the board. ChessVS is currently a team of one, and you're looking at the whole roster. This page is everything I'd want to know before trusting a game with my time: who built it, how, and why.
Before the clubs had banners, there was one player on a couch asking a dangerous question: what if the pieces could fight back? He carried the answer in a notebook for six years — through a military deployment, the day job, and kids' bedtimes — until the tools finally caught up to the idea. ALPHAKNIGHT is what came out the other side: the first piece that refused to be captured quietly.
It started in 2020, on my couch, in the middle of the pandemic. Like half the planet at that time, my free days consisted of being holed up at home, bored out of my mind, and left to my own devices which luckily for me at that time, was clocking hours into online blitz chess. Yet winning was somehow the boring part.
Same openings, same traps, same games playing out the same way. One night a thought landed and wouldn't leave: what if the pieces could fight back?
The idea went into a notebook, and the notebook went everywhere with me. For six years I fleshed out battle mechanics and re-tweaked them, sketched card designs, and dreamt up the club system — pulling from the games that raised me: Magic: The Gathering, Risk, Stratego, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat — and from the chess club and chess team days where I fell in love with tournament play. There was also a less obvious source: twenty years in the Army, working strategic operations, deploying overseas, and retiring as a Major. Chess is a war game. I've studied the real thing.
What I didn't have was a way to build it. A game like this usually takes a team of engineers, and I wasn't a coder. My degree is in Computer Graphics & Interactive Media, and I mean I'd built websites for freelance clients, but a real-time multiplayer game is a different animal. So the notebook waited, and I kept revisiting it, making it better, refusing to let it die.
In late 2025 I started taking AI tools seriously. Most of them wanted to be everything to everyone. I needed something great at the one thing I couldn't do: code a game. That research landed me at Anthropic's doorstep…and everything changed.
The first line of ChessVS code was written in April 2026. About four months later there was a live game at play.chessvs.club with matchmaking, ratings, battle cards, clubs, tournaments, and daily puzzles. Six years of notebook. Four months of build.
And I never built alone in the way that matters: I'm a father of five, the oldest brother of three, and engaged to one very patient fiancée. Every idea in this game survived the family review board first.
Here's the honest split — because you shouldn't have to ask.
The combat math, the battle mechanics, the card designs, the clubs and how they interact — the parts that make ChessVS ChessVS — came from my notebook, not a model. Every line this game won't cross was my call. The code just enforces it.
I wouldn't call myself a coder, so I used AI to cover that shortcoming: it handled the coding while I handled the design. We operated like a small team — I set the direction, the AI executed, and I reviewed everything against the spec. Sometimes it even improved my original idea, or talked me out of a bad one. AI wrote the code. It didn't design the game.
Standard rules. Legal moves only. Cards swing a minority of evenly-matched games, and nothing on this site sells you a win. If you're the better chess player, you win — always.
Yes, I really am, any more and someone's going to put a Han in front of my name…but my goal is that won't be for long, though.
All of the code, none of the design. This still remains a human operation because there's no A.I. in Club.
Because chess is the greatest strategy game ever made — and after your thousandth blitz game, you start seeing the same movie on repeat. I didn't want to fix chess; it isn't broken. I wanted to give it teeth.
The alpha is free to play — you just need an invite, and the waitlist is how you get one. Paid competitive tiers come later, but winning is never for sale.
When I put the pieces away and roll up my board, I'm a father of five, an accomplished technician, a proud veteran, and the guy who wouldn’t let a six-year-old notebook die.
Press, partnerships, or you just want to talk shop — it's one inbox, and I read all of it.
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