What is Pawnborn?

Pawnborn (pawn·born) is two things: a coined English word, and the name of a chess strategy MMO in development by Board Night Inc.

The word

Pawnborn is "pawn" and "born" joined into one word. It is not a misspelling of anything, and as far as we can tell it did not exist before we made it — which is exactly why we chose it.

Inside the game's fiction, the Pawnborn are a people: the descendants of the pieces of two ancient chess courts, most of them descended from pawns, because pawns were always most of any army and outlived their masters. The first sentence every Pawnborn child learns is "no one in the Mosaic is born a knight" — and everything in their world is built on the promise that any pawn may rise. Born a pawn; not bound to stay one. That is the word, and it is also the game's entire argument.

The game, in one breath

You grow a chess kingdom, your citizens become your pieces, and battles are quick fair chess games at your level.

Pawnborn is a massively multiplayer online strategy game built on real chess. You rule a growing territory on a shattered chessboard world. The people who live there train into regiments. When you send an army against a neighbour it marches for hours of real time, and when it arrives the two of you play a game of chess — a real one, on a real board, with clocks — and the result of that game is the result of the battle. Up to sixteen players band together into a republic, and republics go to war with one another.

What Pawnborn is not

Stated plainly, because a new word attracts wrong guesses:

• Not adult content. Pawnborn is a strategy game about chess, kingdoms and medieval heraldry, made for a general audience.
• Not a chess engine, a chess trainer or a chess server. There is real chess inside it, but you are playing a strategy game, not studying openings.
• Not Pawnbarian, which is an unrelated single-player chess roguelike by a different developer. The names look similar; the games have nothing to do with each other.
• Not a pawnbroker, a pawn shop, or anything to do with lending against goods.
• Not "pawn storm" or "pawn structure" — those are chess terms. Pawnborn is a proper noun.
• Not released. It is in development, and the first world will be a small invite-only pre-alpha.

How to say it and write it

One word, three syllables, stress on the first: PAWN-born. Always written as a single capitalised word — Pawnborn, never "Pawn Born" and never "PawnBorn".