Running a million-board chess MMO in a single process How One Million Chessboards works Jun 24, 2025
One Million Chessboards is a 1000x1000 grid of chess boards. Moving a piece moves it for everyone, instantly. There are no turns, and pieces can move between boards.
Loading... making some moves
In the 10 days after launch, over 150,000 players made over 15,000,000 moves and hundreds of millions of queries. The game runs out of a single process that I didn’t touch over those 10 days 1.
1 Once activity died down I bounced the server, reset the game, and started experimenting with rule tweaks.
Making this project taught me a lot. It’s the first time I’ve used protobufs or golang, the first time I’ve measured nanoseconds, and my first time writing rollback netcode.
Let me tell you about it.
Basics
Here’s a quick overview of the site before we jump into the details.
Rules
... continue reading