Chess for people who are good at computers and bad at chess.

Many of my colleagues are excellent chess players. I am not. Something had to be done.

Enter a new chess variant: Permiscuchess! Permiscuchess is a chess variant that is entirely pre-played. Instead of a real-time battle of wits, Permiscuchess is played by devising a clever strategy – a permutation of all chess moves, to be applied one at a time until you win, lose, or draw against thousands of random adversaries.

Play Permiscuchess here. All simulations are done client-side and there is no leaderboard. But feel free to email me to gloat if you find a really good strategy, or send me a Lichess link to a funny game1.

It doesn’t work very well on phones.

I won’t get into all of the rules here – click on “How to play!”

A screenshot of the Permiscuchess app

Going for scholar’s mate as white (pe:e4, bf:c4, q:f3, q:f7, then random) wins about 35% of the time. Can you do better?

  1. Open a game in Lichess by selecting the game, clicking “PGN,” and clicking “Open in Lichess.” ↩