Meet chessroulette.org — a quarantine project

Born out of the idea of connecting with our friends during the quarantine times chessroulette.org is a web platform (d̵e̵s̵k̵t̵o̵p̵ ̵o̵n̵l̵y̵ ̵f̵o̵r̵ ̵n̵o̵w̵) built by me and my good friend Andrei Topli that let’s you play a game of chess while face-timing with a good friend (or six), or with a complete stranger if you are feeling adventurous.

The name is inspired by the (in)famous chatroulette.com and by all means we think it’s a fun play on words but we do hope the similarities will stop here. Honestly I don’t think chess goes well with nudity anyway but you never know :)

In terms of development, it took us about a month of work to come up with a first MVP, and a few iterations after to bring it where it is today. This being said the product is still in its very A̶l̶p̶h̶a̶ Beta state, with only basic features currently supported, but our goal here is to present it to people early on, and hopefully gather a solid state of requirements or features and ideally a small community of people interested in using it.

This means we’re looking for as much feedback from you, dear reader, as possible, so please don’t hesitate to give it a try at https://chessroulette.org and write us a comment! That would help tremendously.

To end, I’d like to say this was a great project to work on, with many lessons both in terms of developing new skills (like WebRTC and a bit of Rust for me) and I’m so lucky to have had both the time and skills to be able to put this idea in practice. Hope you enjoy it too and please let us know in a comment below your thoughts about it. Or your issues. Or you critique. Anything helps at this stage.

P.S. Oh, the funny characters in the pictures above and their friends are part of a totally unplanned 5am purchase one morning after 14h or so of coding. I think they fit pretty well with the vibe we want to transmit with chessroulette, so we’d like to thank popmarleo, the designer, for bringing them to life and making them available for purchase.

That’s it, thank you,

The chessroulette-ers :)