Development journal

Notes from the making of Pawnborn — design arguments, decisions we changed our minds about, and the occasional thing that did not work.

• Fair by construction, not by promise

  31 July 2026

  Everyone says their game is fair. Here is the difference between a promise and a rule the code cannot break, and why we wrote ours down before we had anything to sell.

• Where the name Pawnborn came from

  31 July 2026

  Naming a game is mostly a search problem wearing a creative hat. What we needed, what we rejected, and why a coined word was worth the trouble.

• Why build a chess MMO at all?

  31 July 2026

  Chess has six hundred million players and almost no persistent worlds. That gap is either a warning or an opportunity, and we spent a long time deciding which.