Pawnborn
Board Night Inc. · in development
Pawnborn
A chess strategy MMO. You grow a kingdom, your citizens become your pieces, and every battle is a fair game of chess at your level.
Three things at once
A kingdom to grow
Wake land out of the mist, raise farms and walls and barracks, and turn the folk who live there into the army that defends them. The world runs on real hours, whether or not you are watching it.
A game of chess to win
When two armies meet, the mist rises and the battlefront becomes a chessboard. Every piece on it is a regiment of real people in your service. Trade a rook carelessly and it is not an abstraction that bleeds.
Sixteen people beside you
Nobody plays this alone. Up to sixteen sovereigns swear an oath and become a republic — one full side of the old board — with no crown at the top of it and a war to fight together.
Fair, on purpose, at the level of the rules
Chess is the one game where nobody has ever needed to ask whether the other side paid for an advantage. We built the whole thing around keeping that true.
Every involuntary battle between two prepared players is fair chess: the same pieces, the same clocks, and colours decided by a coin. What a large kingdom buys you is stakes, information, preparation and opportunity — never a better position on the board. And nothing in the shop will ever change that, because nothing in the shop will ever do anything but look good.
Where it stands
Pawnborn is in development and not yet released. There is no launch date to announce, and we would rather say that plainly than invent one. What happens next, in order:
Pre-alpha — invite only
A small, closed world with a limited number of players, so the parts that matter get tested by people rather than by us. Invitations go to the notify list first.
Beta
Wider, longer, and the first time the world is big enough for the republics and wars to behave the way they are meant to.
Launch
Free to play, on the web and on phones, with a promise about money that we published before we had anything to sell.
Hear when the gates open
One email when the invite-only pre-alpha opens, one when the beta does. Nothing else — no newsletter, no drip campaign, no reminders that we exist.