Assalamu Alaikum.

Background

Joker's Chess was born on 20 August 2026— during the so-called cultural program, “Night of Mathematicians”, at the Mathematics Department.

While others did their thing, the dev simply denied the event, sat at home with the CLRS Algorithms book, a Kaggle project in Python and C++, and a few cups of chay.

This game was born as a result.

Crunching over 200 billion nodes of traditional chess-engine computation using optimized minimax search, accumulated over 100+ hours of development and computation—including an 18-hour continuous coding session—the experimental results appeared promising and seemed reasonably balanced. This led to the idea of developing a dedicated chess website and engine for the variant: Joker's Chess.

The ruleset and board design were independently developed by the dev. Upon further investigation, a chess variant called Pink Chess was found to be its closest known match in terms of board setup. However, Pink Chess, designed by Dutch physicist H. G. Muller, follows a different ruleset from Joker's Chess.

Joker's Chess is an asymmetric variant that can be viewed as an attacker–defender zero-sum interaction, with no draw conditions altering its fundamental terminal states.

About the Dev — Sami Sadik

Sami Sadik is a former Presidential Scholar in the Department of Physics at Middle East Technical University (METU), Ankara, Türkiye. He is currently pursuing his sophomore year in Mathematics at a local public university, Shahjalal University of Science and Technology.

His interests lie at the intersection of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics, alongside broader interests in forensic linguistics, culture and literature.

His research interests include:

• Discrete mathematical structures for interpreting quantum foundations
• Generative human language using neural networks and reinforcement learning
• Stylometric approaches to emotion detection and the analysis of communication patterns in youth social media

The Research

Joker's Chess is currently being developed as an exploratory research project under the informal supervision of A. K. M. Fakhrul Hossain, Assistant Professor in the Department of CSE at SUST.

The ruleset and engine (Alnilaam) is expected to evolve as empirical data are collected and new edge cases are discovered through human play.

Contribute

Maintaining and developing Joker's Chess independently is a demanding endeavor. Contributions, feedback, and support are deeply appreciated as we continue to explore and push the boundaries of this variant together.

Credits and Acknowledgements

Chess piece artwork ("Papercut" set) created by Nikolay Anzarov, used via Lichess.org, licensed under CC BY 4.0. Original piece set repository: lichess-org/lila. A sincere acknowledgement to the Lichess project and its contributors for making high-quality open chess assets available to the community. All background photography and visual media were captured independently by Sami Sadik.