Quantum Chess: The Past, Present, and Future

TLDR: Quantum Chess has been through a lot of iterations and a lot of collaborations over the past decade. It’s become a massive Unity project full of tech debt, and it’s too unwieldy to live up to its potential. So I’m rebuilding it. Again. This time web native, using Quantum Forge. The goal is to solve two problems at once: accessibility and iteration speed. Right now, changes take months and multiple engineers. After the rebuild, I’ll be able to ship features fast, and the game can finally start growing into what it was always meant to be.

It began with happenstance

I was a grad student at USC studying quantum computing. I had a habit of showing up to campus way too early, and one day I was sitting in an empty classroom reading a book. A man walked in looking for a place to charge his phone. We got to chatting.

His name was Berok Khoshnevis, a professor in the ISE department. He told me about a class he was teaching the following semester on creativity. It sounded interesting, and after some thought (and urging from my now wife Laurie), I signed up as an elective. The class was about looking at problems from different angles, thinking outside the box. It ended with a month-long project, and given my background in quantum computing, Prof. Khoshnevis suggested I try making a game that could help people understand quantum physics.

I’ve always believed that real understanding comes from interaction and experience. And when it comes to the quantum world, we don’t have much of that. A game felt like the perfect way to change that. The idea wasn’t to teach people quantum physics or make them learn the math. It was to give them hands-on interaction, something tangible their brain could latch onto. By the end of May 2014, I had a prototype. I called it Q.

That first prototype was built in Java and ran on my Android tablet. I wouldn’t call it a fun game yet, but it was a genuinely quantum experience. Movement on the board was driven by unitary evolution of a quantum state (specifically, the square root of the iSwap). This created real quantum superposition, and opened the door for entanglement and interference. That core idea, movement on a grid as a unitary operation on quantum state, became the foundation for everything that followed.

I showed the prototype to my research group, and my advisor, Todd Brun, sent me to meet Spiros Michalakis at Caltech. That meeting changed the trajectory of my life.

Anyone Can Quantum

Spiros is the Manager of Outreach at Caltech’s Institute for Quantum Information and Matter. He’d recently finished a project using Minecraft to illustrate quantum effects, but in his own words, it was fake. What I was showing him was the real deal: genuine quantum effects expressed through gameplay mechanics. We started meeting weekly to figure out how to turn the idea into something fun and playable. That collaboration produced the first proper prototype of Quantum Chess, which Spiros used to create a video for a Caltech event. The video was Anyone Can Quantum (January 2016), featuring Paul Rudd playing Quantum Chess against Stephen Hawking.

After the video and the Caltech event, we ran a Kickstarter to fund the first public release. Special thanks to Ben Hosac, an artist who worked on that early version, for helping me pull off the campaign. We brought on Broken Circle Studio to help get the first public version over the finish line and onto Steam. From there I continued iterating on my own while finishing grad school. Quantum Chess was now a Unity project, written entirely in C#.

Enter Google Quantum AI

I kept at it slowly for a few years. I rebuilt the core engine in C++ for performance, trying to get a functional AI opponent (the first version was laughable, and it turns out AI for Quantum Chess is a genuinely hard problem). I kept meeting with Spiros, kept working on my grad research in quantum error correction.

Then in early 2020, Spiros got talking with Alan Ho at Google’s quantum computing team. Alan asked: could Quantum Chess run on their quantum computer?

That question sparked the next evolution of the game, and pushed me toward pursuing quantum games full time. To run on real quantum hardware, I had to rebuild the game from scratch, rules and all, to work within the constraints of a real quantum system. We pulled it off, thanks in large part to some incredible engineers at Google, and debuted Quantum Chess running on Google’s quantum computing hardware at the 2020 Quantum Summer Symposium.

The collaboration continued for a few years and led to some cool projects: the open source Unitary game library, a Quantum Chess puzzle experience for the National Quantum Initiative, tournaments at the Q2B conference, and renewed investigation into AI for the game. We also started kicking around the idea of a more generic quantum game engine.

A lot of great people were part of these efforts. Doug Strain and Conrad Holt in engineering, Keith Guerin, Sharona Oshana and Mariann Nagy on the creative side, Evert van Nieuwenburg and others looking at AI (Evert had come in during early AI investigations at Caltech), Ricardo Olenewa on production. And plenty of others I’m not naming here but should.

By this point, the Quantum Chess Unity project had become a beast of tech debt. We kept iterating, with generous funding from IQIM’s outreach department, but every change was expensive and slow. We’d been trying to get to mobile for a while without success. We kept taking on interesting collaborative projects, which were great but kept piling on complexity. We did finally get a strong AI player into the game: Aqaqaq, the brainchild of Conrad Holt. But progress kept slowing down. The project had reached a point where I couldn’t meaningfully work on it by myself anymore.

So on the side, I started building out the quantum game engine.

New Opportunities: LCAD and GDC

In the spring of 2024, Tim Pryor, someone I’d met through the original public release and a longtime champion of quantum games, introduced me to the Laguna College of Art and Design. I was offered a position teaching quantum game design that fall. This led to a Memorandum of Understanding between LCAD, Quantum Realm Games, and Caltech’s IQIM, with a shared mission: explore quantum games as a medium, and through games, advance the public’s awareness and experience of quantum mechanics. It’s been an incredible learning experience. It kicked off with a Quantum Game Jam.

The jam was scheduled for November 2024, so I kicked into high gear on the engine. That effort became the first version of Quantum Forge, and teams at the game jam used it to put genuine quantum effects into their games.

After the jam I kept iterating on Quantum Forge, fixing bugs and building features, because the next milestone was coming fast. LCAD had a booth at GDC 2026, and we were going to run a quantum arcade. My job was to get Quantum Forge ready for teams to build games for it.

Time, Resources, and AI

One thing I’ve learned over ten years of quantum game development: the vast majority of it is just regular game development. Sound, art, backend, frontend, level design. All the things that make a game a game. So with help from Ricardo and Spiros and others, I started looking for teams to hire to build out prototypes. But hiring takes time and money, and by August I only had one team lined up for one game. I was getting worried that even with the team, we’d struggle to land something that felt like a real quantum experience. LCAD could provide art and design, but the iteration time from prototype to polish is no joke.

Around the same time, I started experimenting with agentic code tools. They were getting good fast, and I noticed they were particularly strong at web development. I had an idea: if we were only doing one game anyway, maybe I could build it myself for the web using these tools. So I created a web wrapper for Quantum Forge and got to work. Within a few days I had a playable prototype of Quantris.

I went straight to Twitch and started asking professional tetr.io players for feedback. A few of them really took to the project, and their input helped push it from prototype to something real. Between the Twitch players and the LCAD students providing art and design direction, we showed up to GDC 2026 with Quantris on a quantum arcade, plus two more prototypes: PonQ and Bloch Invaders.

The future of Quantum Chess

Which brings us to today, and back to Quantum Chess.

I’ve always had big dreams for this game. Different game modes and rule sets. New quantum state visualizations. Skins. Player-created puzzles. Built-in tournament support. Pluggable AI with an API so people can build and test their own Quantum Chess AI. Quantum Computer Chess Championships? Yes please.

The reality is, in the current state of the project, any single one of those features would take months of work for a team of people. And I don’t have the resources to staff that consistently. IQIM’s generous funding and the enthusiastic support of so many collaborators over the years got us to where we are, and I’m grateful beyond words. But for Quantum Chess to stand on its own and grow into its potential, it needs to be easier to work with.

So the next iteration has begun. I’m rebuilding Quantum Chess from the ground up to be web native, using Quantum Forge. It will take time; there’s already a lot in the game. But once it’s done, I’ll have a project I can iterate on rapidly. The same workflow that produced Quantris, PonQ, and Bloch Invaders in weeks instead of months or years.

I know a lot of people have strong feelings about agentic code. I get it, and it has real downsides. But for me, it’s been a game changer in the most literal sense. Ideas that have been stuck in my head for a decade are finally becoming real. I don’t have to wait for funding or staffing to try something. I can build a prototype and show it to an artist instead of trying to describe what’s in my head. That approach worked for Quantris, for PonQ, for Bloch Invaders. Those were all ideas that sat on a shelf for years. Now they’re playable.

And what about the existing player base? The Kickstarter backers and the people who bought the game on Steam? My hope is that you’ll be better off. One of Quantum Chess’s biggest problems has always been finding enough players. Making it available on the web should make it much easier for the community to grow. I plan to make the web version the core of everything, with native platform builds (including a new Steam version and mobile) wrapping around it. And I will find a way to recognize the people who supported the game early. I’m not sure exactly what that looks like yet, but I have ideas.

So: thank you. To everyone who has stuck with this project through the years, through all its iterations and growing pains. This post left too many of you unnamed. Know that your support and effort are truly appreciated. If you want to follow along with the web rebuild, check out chess.quantumnative.io. And join the Quantum Chess community to help guide its rebirth.