Chess for Three

Inspiration

We all enjoy playing chess so we decided to invest time in creating a chess game that involve 3 player than 2 since we are a team of 3.

What it does

An expanded hexagonal board to allow for 3 players to face off against each other simultaneously.

How we Built it

We built it using Flask, Python, Trilio, and Whatsapp. We began by referencing pre-existing Python libraries and a Twilio blog in order to get a better understanding of how to go about implementing our vision. We followed a Twilio blog post on using Whatsapp to allow two friends to play chess using the Twilio Rest API.

Challenges we ran into

Some of the challenges were that we couldn't get the coordinate system for the hexagon to work and we had trouble trying to connect to Trilio. We wanted to develop a mathematical way to calculate the center of every tile so we could avoid hardcoding those values. Ultimately, we had to hard code the values since we couldn't figure out a way to do it.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud that the we have completed the interface of the chess board and be able to have the chess pieces move according to its rules of the game. We also created a new version of Forsyth-Edwards Notation (FEN) to accommodate for the larger board size and player count. We named this new notation "Triple Human REadjustment Notation" (THREN).

What we learned

We learned that implementing use of other software require trial and error in order to get it right. We also learned that chess boards are often digitally represented through a series of 64 fit "bitboards". We struggled to efficiently scale the concept up to 96 bits to accommodate the new board size.