About 900 million people know how to play chess, and almost none of them have ever watched their opponent panic. We spent twenty years digitizing the board and quietly threw away the person sitting behind it.
So I put the person back. I built Rovian: real-time chess with video on both sides. Two boards, two faces, one very uncomfortable silence after you hang your queen.
I built it alone. It's in open beta. Here's the technical part, and the embarrassing part.
The bug nobody filed
Online chess is a solved engineering problem. Lichess is a genuinely beautiful piece of open source work. Chess.com is a machine that prints money and puzzles. Neither of them is broken.
