Marble & Mayhem

Chess where every capture is a duel. The pieces are living marble statues — white Carrara with gold, black Nero Marquina with silver — standing on a polished board in a sunlit ruined colonnade. When one piece takes another, the camera cuts to a cinematic side shot, the attacker strikes (spear, sword, crozier, fists of stone, arcane bolt) and the victim topples and shatters.

• Engine: Stockfish 19 (lite NNUE, WebAssembly, in a Web Worker), adjustable from ~1320 Elo to full strength.
• Modes: play White, play Black, two players on one screen, watch Stockfish play itself, or challenge a friend online with a six-letter invite code (or link). Your last local game is saved and can be continued.
• Battles: every piece has several attacks and its victims die in different ways — toppled, crumbled, launched, frozen solid, smitten by lightning — plus a Holy Hand Grenade, knights on coconut-powered imaginary horses, flesh wounds, and a Mortal-Kombat-style finish on checkmate. ~175 voiced lines full of game and Monty Python references.
• Extras: the Black Knight ("'Tis but a scratch"), a killer rabbit, a giant foot, Patsy with coconuts, silly walks, veterans with golden laurels, hints, move evaluation (!!/??), accuracy and MVP after the game, replays, photo mode, and four legendary games (Légal 1750, the Immortal, the Evergreen, the Opera Game) replayed as cinema. Tap to skip any duel.
• Online: invite code or link, rematch, spectators, Monty Python taunts.
• Mobile: lighter models and textures, dynamic resolution, portrait-aware cameras, touch controls, installable as an app.
• Rendering: three.js WebGL, HDRI sky with a matched sun and 4K shadows, triplanar marble, N8AO ambient occlusion, bloom, depth of field in battles, AgX tone mapping, SMAA.
• Assets: every model and animation is built procedurally in Blender (Python, headless): six rigged statue types with idle/walk/attack/hit/death/victory, plus the arena. Voices and sound effects by ElevenLabs.

npm install
npm run dev      # http://localhost:8240
npm run server   # online play (WebSocket on :8241)
npm run smoke    # plays every event in Chrome and fails on any console error

Live at https://mayhem.bjarby.com.

See CLAUDE.md for the asset pipeline.

Credits and licences

• Stockfish.js (public/engine/) — GPL-3.0 (licence text in public/engine/Copying.txt), https://github.com/nmrugg/stockfish.js
• Textures and HDRI — Poly Haven, CC0
• Title music — generated with Suno; voices and sound effects — ElevenLabs
• three.js, postprocessing, n8ao, chess.js — MIT / BSD