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
