Chaturang: Ancient Chess

Before chess, there was Chaturang.

In 8th-century India, two armies of saffron and terracotta faced each other across an 8×8 board. Elephants. Chariots. Horses. A king and his vizier. The bones of every chess game you know — already there, 1,300 years before the modern game finished crystallizing in Renaissance Europe. Chaturang is widely considered the earliest known ancestor of modern chess.

Now reborn on mobile, with a strong learned AI and live online multiplayer.

PLAY ONLINE WITH A FRIEND New in 1.1: real-time human-vs-human multiplayer. Tap "Play Online," your phone generates a six-character room code, share it with a friend over any messenger — WhatsApp, iMessage, email, anything — they tap "Join Room," and you're playing live across any distance. No accounts. No signup. No matchmaking purgatory. Just two devices, one game, and a friend who agreed to play.

PLAY AGAINST A SMART AI For solo play, Chaturang ships with a tuned alpha-beta search AI in three difficulty tiers — Easy, Medium, and Hard — each unlocked by winning enough games at the level below. Hard thinks several moves deep with a KR–K endgame tablebase that recognizes won endgames instantly. Easy makes occasional blunders so casual players and kids can find their footing. The whole AI runs offline — no connection required for solo games.

THE GAME THAT BECAME CHESS Chaturang is chess in skeleton form. Same 8×8 board. Same six piece types. Same goal: trap the enemy king. But pieces move shorter distances than they do in modern chess - the elephant (bishop) and chariot (rook) cover less ground, the vizier (queen) lacks her later range. Castling doesn't exist. Pawns promote when they reach the back rank. And the king has one ancient superpower no modern chess piece kept: a once-per-game knight's leap, a strange echo of mobility from when chess pieces hadn't yet hardened into the forms we recognize today.

The result is a slower, denser, more patient game. You feel positions form. You feel the room close around the king. Every familiar chess strategy idea - pin, fork, skewer, weak square, open file, prophylaxis - still applies, but the tempo is different. The game rewards a different kind of attention.

WHAT'S IN THE APP • Online room-code multiplayer (no signup, host or join) • Single-player versus a strong AI with three unlockable difficulty tiers • A learned KR–K endgame tablebase that ends won endgames cleanly • End-of-game move list - review every move you and your opponent played • Lifetime stats: wins, losses, draws, current play streak, longest streak • Separate online win/loss tally so AI wins and human wins don't co-mingle • Coin economy: earn coins for finishing games, spend them on hints • Royal Indian art direction: deep maroon, saffron, parchment, terracotta, a carved ornate frame around the play surface, a stone-pedestal status banner • Native iPhone, iPad, and Android phone and tablet - designed primarily for portrait play • Offline-first: the AI doesn't need a network connection

WHAT'S NOT IN THE APP No subscriptions. No grind for currency. No microtransactions. No leaderboard pestering. No daily-streak guilt notifications. Just the game.

ABOUT Chaturang is made by Neurantra, an independent studio. We built it because we love chess and wanted to share the game it grew out of - and to make a chess-family app that didn't try to capture all your attention. There's no rush to get good. The game has waited 1,300 years; it can wait for your next move.

Open the app, pick a card, take your side.