The Subnet Gambit · est. 1994
Real 3D chess — real geometry, real shadows — squeezed through a low internal resolution and an ordered dither until it looks like something that shipped on three floppies. Behind the cabinet is a ranked ladder that lives on the Avalanche C-Chain.
A chess engine worth losing to, a variant that changes how the board feels, and a ladder that outlives the server it was played on.
The move generator is checked against published perft counts for six standard positions — all 26 reference node counts exact — which pins down castling rights, en passant, absolute pins and underpromotion. It renders through WebGPU at five strengths, the top one a Stockfish build that will not lose to you.
Two new pieces, both worth about 4.3 pawns, and both able to reach squares they may never capture on. That single rule forces a third highlight colour and makes a king legally able to stand beside an Alchemist. Its rules screen is drawn by asking the move generator, so the help can never lie.
A hidden rating decides who you play. A visible ladder of seven tiers lags behind it, gated by promotion series and cushioned by demotion shields. Every finished game is settled on chain, so the standings survive us.
Division IV is the bottom of a tier and I the top, so your division counts down as you climb. Most players place around Silver. Palladium and rhodium are not decoration — they really are worth more than gold, and rhodium is the most valuable metal on earth.
They pay no LP at all. Your position is granted in one go when the fifth resolves, from the rating those games actually produced — otherwise the first five games would both set your rating and be scored against it.
Crossing a division line parks you one point below it: best of three to move up a division, best of five for a tier. Lose inside a series and it costs no LP; the series ends the moment it is decided, not when the games run out.
Fall below your division floor and you spend a shield instead — granted on promotion, three games of grace. A ladder you can fall down instantly is a ladder nobody wants to climb.
Read straight off the contract — season 1. Players still in placements are not listed; they have no ladder position yet.
| Player | Rank | LP | W–L–D | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | plcyn83b | SILVER IV | 54 | 3–2–0 |
| 2 | plcyn83a | BRONZE I | 91 | 2–3–0 |
You can play the engine immediately, with no wallet and no account. Ranked play needs an address, because that is what a rank is attached to.
Core or MetaMask. The game offers to add Avalanche Fuji for you. Signing in is a signature, not a transaction — it proves you hold the address and costs nothing.
One transaction, a fraction of a cent. Handles are owned — case-insensitively, 1–16 characters of letters, numbers, hyphen and underscore — so the top of the leaderboard cannot be impersonated.
A ranked game costs 0.01AVAX to accept. Win or draw and you keep it; lose and it goes to the protocol. You deposit once and play from that balance — a wallet confirmation between “opponent found” and your first move, with a clock already running, is not a game. The balance is yours: withdraw it whenever you like, including while the ladder is paused.
Matchmaking pairs you by rating, widening its window the longer you wait. Five minutes plus three seconds a move. Win, lose or draw, the result is signed and settled on chain within seconds of the last move.
The ladderis: rating, LP, tier, streaks, series, season history, and a hash of every game’s score sheet. The moves are not. Putting them there would mean a legal move generator written in Solidity, variant pieces included, and forty-odd transactions per game to arrive at a result the referee already knows.
So a server referees the games and signs the outcome. It cannot invent a player, settle between wallets that never registered, or write a rating directly — every settlement runs the contract’s own rules over two opted-in addresses. It can lie about who won.That is the trust assumption, it is written into the contract’s source, and the fix is a multisig rather than a promise.
Since a game now costs a stake, that assumption is worth restating in money: the signer decides who pays. The contract limits what it can do — the fee is capped, the protocol’s share can never be swept out of player deposits, and your balance is withdrawable at any time, even paused — but the ladder is upgradeable, and an upgrade can change the rules under stored funds. On a testnet with faucet AVAX that is a small thing to accept. It would not be on mainnet, and it is why the owner belongs in a multisig before this pattern goes anywhere real.