Explore a world. Build your kingdom.
Fight your battles on the board.
Explore a fresh, dynamic map that changes with every campaign. Claim key towns, manage four essential resources, and assemble grand armies as you expand your realm.
When opposing forces meet, the overworld steps aside and a battle begins.
Every battle is fought through an authentic game of Chess or Xiangqi. The result determines what happens to the forces involved, and shapes the course of the larger war.
Don’t reinvent Chess or Xiangqi.
Build a game around them.
The overworld exists to add strategic depth to the board games — without changing what makes them unique. Each side brings its own authentic rules to the table, preserving the distinct identity of Chess and Xiangqi.
The strategic layer determines how you explore, where you expand, which towns you control, and what forces you bring into battle. Levels, skills and artifacts shape movement, vision and economy — never the pieces themselves.
But once battle begins, the board game takes over.
Chess is played according to the authentic rules of Chess. Xiangqi is played according to the authentic rules of Xiangqi. Their pieces, movement and mechanics remain true to the games themselves.
Two games. Two ways to wage war.
Choose your side and build your realm around a distinct board game, each with its own rules, pieces and strategic character.
Chess
Build a kingdom around the classic game of Chess. Develop your territory, recruit powerful forces, and bring the full strategic depth of Chess to the battlefield.
Xiangqi
Build an empire around Xiangqi. Develop rapidly, command highly mobile forces, and master its unique battlefield mechanics — including the Cannon, River and Palace.
Build a kingdom — settle every battle on the board
Same-faction wars are played on the genuine article. When chess meets xiangqi, the two boards are joined rather than compromised.
Chess vs Chess
A standard chessboard. Nothing added, nothing taken away.
Xiangqi vs Xiangqi
A standard xiangqi board, with the river and both palaces where they belong.
Chess vs Xiangqi
A 9×4 chess territory joined straight onto a 9×5 xiangqi territory.
Chess, intact
Xiangqi, intact
Build your army. Pick your pieces wisely.
Every commander has a limited army capacity, creating a strategic system for choosing which pieces to bring into battle.
Powerful pieces require more capacity, while smaller pieces allow you to field a larger force. Do you invest in elite pieces, or build a broader army with more support?
Two dials, turned separately
How hard the realm is and how hard the opponent across the board is are not the same question — so they are not the same setting.
World difficulty
Sets the pressure on the map itself — the economy you are handed, and what the wilderness expects of you.
Battle AI
Eight rungs, each with an Elo label, from an opponent playing at random to one playing without restriction.
Learn it, drill it, or take it online
Campaign
Two expeditions across the same island — one for each side of the table. It is built to teach both games through play: you pick up Chess and Xiangqi because you need them, not because a rulebook told you to first.
Custom Game
Your map, your factions, your dials. Set the world up the way you want to argue with it.
Practice
Drills for the board itself — the openings, the endings, and the pieces you keep losing to.
Hotseat
One machine, two commanders, one chair. The oldest way to settle it.
Network multiplayer
Play with friends online, with flexible turn options for every kind of match.
In development at Playbit Studios
Pieces of the Dynasties is being developed by a solo developer, with AI-assisted tools used in the production of its art.
AI helps make it possible to create a game of this scope as a one-person project, while the game’s design, direction, systems, animations, and creative decisions remain under my control.
By using these tools where they make sense, I can keep development costs significantly lower than a traditional production — and pass those savings on through a more accessible game price.