Rook's Gambit
Rook's Gambit
A meditative chess game where the music is slow, the moves are deliberate, and the silence between turns might be more important than the checkmate.
I made this as a personal experiment. Part practice, part presence.
Edit: doesn't work well on non Mac, more testing is needed :)
Play online (no download needed): https://www.fairweatherproductions.com/sketchy-ponderings/chess.html
🎵 Music, code, and design by me.
More strange and subtle things at:
✧ Sketchy Ponderings
✧ Fairweather ✧ The Second Gaze
Development log
- Rook's Gambit - Update/LaunchAug 02, 2025
- Rook's Gambit - A Game of Chess - is Active but not finished :)Jul 30, 2025
Comments
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
On Knight difficulty a pawn just jumped over the bishop at early game. Full list of moves bellow:
1.White Pawn moves to e4
1.Black Pawn moves to d5
2.White Knight moves to c3
2.Black Pawn moves to e4 and takes White Pawn
3.White Knight moves to e4 and takes Black Pawn
3.Black Bishop moves to e6
4.White Pawn moves to b3
4.Black Knight moves to c6
5.White Bishop moves to c4
5.Black Pawn moves to e5
Thanks so much for playing and reporting this bug!
Added to dev notes :)
It somehow is very laggy.
Thanks for trying it!
Hmm.. I don't get any lag on my PC. I don't have access to other PC's to test from though, but, I should be testing with other PC's too :) .
What I'm seeing is screen flickering at the bottom of the screen and that on mobile it's completely bjorked, I disabled the mobile friendly option until I figure it out. Seems to have to do with the embed for itch.io. The build on my website, the development build is way more stable, no flickering bottom of screen and mobile works good. But laggy in general makes me think I need to test on more devices.
This link is to the development build. https://www.fairweatherproductions.com/sketchy-ponderings/chess.html Thanks again :)
Mhh it lagged on my Mac on chrome, but on an older Windows it works fine lol. I guess it's just a regular chess game with no twist? I see castling isn't even implemented.
Oh well, fun little 10 minutes game lol.
Yeah no twist, I started making two other games this year and got too ahead of myself just making stuff up, so I decided to try my hand at chess, the game is so/so but I think it feels good to play, it's super easy though. Feels like a beginners learning tool to me.
Anyways thanks so much for trying it on your chrome (I used to be a Mac guy, lol, again) If I remember correctly CSS often acts different on Mac and Windows or maybe the JS, we'll see.
But thanks truly truly helpful :)
And to clarify, I’ve been playing chess since I was a kid—but not well. I just loosely knew the rules. For example it wasn’t until making this that I found out I’ve been calling rooks ‘castles’ my whole life. I thought rooks were bishops. lol (shakes head)...