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. The developer denied the event, and this project was born as a result.

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 student at the department of Mathematics at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology. Previously, Sami was a student at the department of Physics at Middle East Technical University, Ankara Campus.

His interests lie at the intersection of Mathematics, Computer Science, and Physics.

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 and support are deeply appreciated as we continue to explore and push the boundaries of this variant together. Feedback can be given to this email: granitesmash@protonmail.com

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.