Just as Karate Kid sparked interest in martial arts among young and old in the '80s, Netflix's excellent miniseries The Queen's Gambit has definitely made chess explode in popularity, and also gave rise to various 'tributes', so to speak. One of them is The Kilobyte's Gambit, an online chess game in just 1,024 bytes of JavaScript, with retro graphics very appropriate for the occasion.
A Game, a Series, and the Web in Flames
In general terms, it is logical to think that chess doesn't need any help. This fabulous game has millions of participants around the world who measure and optimize their skills every day. In fact, anyone interested in learning and improving at chess can access dedicated services and abundant online resources at no cost. However, the power of Netflix shattered all projections (including mine), and its miniseries The Queen's Gambit put chess into orbit.
That means that in addition to multiplying sales of chess boards and books, many artists, designers, and programmers decided to celebrate this series in their own way. For example, artist Pinot W. Ichwandardi imagined The Queen's Gambit as an MS-DOS game, with fabulous results. And today it's the turn of Matt Round from the Vole.wtf portal, who created The Kilobyte's Gambit, a online chess game in 1,024 bytes of JavaScript. How is that possible?
The Kilobyte's Gambit: A Most Unusual Online Chess Game
In essence, The Kilobyte's Gambit is based on the code of the «nano chess» developed by Óscar Toledo G., and the graphics of the aforementioned Ichwandardi, with a retro CGA palette of 4 colors that fits perfectly. Being 1,024 bytes, the game has two major limitations: you can only play with White, and it doesn't announce victory or defeat (it simply blocks piece movement when one of those conditions arises).
However, The Kilobyte's Gambit supports special moves such as castling, capture in passing or «en passant», and pawn promotion (only to queens). The official page explains that the engine anticipates a maximum of four moves, without losing sight of factors like piece value, strength in certain areas of the board, and capture speed.
Just hours after its launch, The Kilobyte's Gambit went from 200 simultaneous players to more than 1,200, without too much intervention from social networks. Everything seems to indicate that that number will keep rising, and for our part we definitely recommend you pay a visit.
Official site: Click here
