Server-authoritative.
The server checks every move with a PHP port of chess.js. Clocks run on the server, and animation time is never charged to a player.
Beta, free, no ads
Chess in a stone hall.
Pieces walk to their square. A capturing piece strikes with its weapon, and the captured piece breaks into stone that stays on the board edge for the rest of the game.
3D piece models by nbauchat, used with permission.
Every move is animated, and every capture stays.
The camera orbits the board through 360 degrees. Fragments from captured pieces pile up at the edge and remain there until the game ends.
Pieces walk
Each piece turns toward its square and walks there. The knight jumps.
Stone breaks
The break pattern is computed in the browser at load, and the fragments run on a physics step of about 190 lines: gravity, bounce, floor friction, sleep.
Speed is yours
Play at 1x, 2x or skip the animation entirely.
Two ways to play.
No account needed
Against the computer
Stockfish 19 runs inside your browser in a Web Worker (the 1.8 MB single-threaded lite build). 8 levels from Novice to Master, a training mode with take-backs, and speed set to 1x, 2x or instant.
Sign in with Google or email
Online
A lobby, invite links and quick match by rating. 4 time controls: 5+3, 10+0, 15+10 and 30+0. Glicko-2 ratings, a leaderboard, profiles, replays in the 3D scene, game chat and direct messages.
Built by one person, about 320 commits in 7 days.
Elman Huseynov did the design, 3D, backend, frontend and deployment. First commit on 25 September 2026, live on 2 October. The source code is private.
The stack.
Laravel 13 on PHP 8.3, Inertia 3 with server-side rendering, React 19, TypeScript, three.js 0.186 through react-three-fiber (WebGL 2) and MariaDB. Live updates go through Pusher Channels with a polling fallback every 1.5 s.
- Laravel
- React
- three.js
- Stockfish WASM
- MariaDB
- Pusher
Shared hosting.
It runs on Hostinger shared hosting with no daemons, no WebSocket server and no workers. Cron handles clocks and cleanup, and the SSR renderer listens on a Unix socket because the host refuses loopback TCP.
Security.
CSP with nonces, HSTS, rate limits on every action and a firewall with auto-block. OWASP Top 10 checks are covered by tests.
Tested and shipped by CI.
Pest for PHP, Vitest for TypeScript and Playwright end to end, including a test that plays e4 against the computer on production. GitHub Actions runs lint, static analysis and the build, then deploys over rsync and runs smoke tests.
Make the first move.
Wizard Chess is in beta and in active development. It is free and has no ads.
3D piece models by nbauchat (Cults3D), used with the author's permission. Stockfish is GPL-3.0.