Tournaments

Quantum Chess 1.5.0 is live at chess.quantumnative.io, and the headline is tournaments. Four formats, open to anyone to run, and a new set of badges for the people who play them, win them, and bring everyone together. There’s a batch of smaller things for new and returning players too, further down.

Anyone can organize

The best thing about an online game is playing with other people, and the best way to get more of them in the same place at the same time is a tournament. So organizing is open to everyone. Gather your club, your Discord, your friends, and run an event on your own schedule. You set the rules and pick a time. The server does the rest.

Organizing pays off too. Run an event that fills up and plays through to a winner, and you earn a badge for it. Keep running them and the badges keep climbing. Every one of them is free to wear.

Four formats

Pick Swiss, round robin, single elimination or arena. Play live with a clock, or by correspondence with a deadline on each round. Open the event to everyone, to premium members, or to whoever has your invite code. Set the time control, cap the field, and publish. The server pairs each round, handles the no-shows, and keeps the standings.

Arena is a good one to try first. It has no rounds. You join, you get paired with whoever is waiting, you finish, you go back into the pool. It runs until the buzzer, and you can join late, so nobody has to be there at the start.

The badges

Fourteen new badges in two tracks, one for players and one for organizers. A tournament counts once it finishes with eight or more players who each played a game, and a clear winner. Organizers are welcome to play in their own events; they just earn the organizer badges for them rather than the player ones.

For players:

• Ensemble. Played every game of a tournament, no forfeits. Showing up is the first thing rewarded, because every game you play is a game somebody else gets to play.
• Triplet. Finished in the top three.
• Collapse. Won a tournament. The whole field of possibilities collapsed to one outcome, you.
• Perpetual Motion. Won an arena. An arena never stops pairing.
• Schrödinger’s Cat. Won a knockout. A bracket is a box everyone else gets sealed in.
• Unitary. Won without losing a game. Nothing lost.
• Quantum Leap. Won as one of the lowest-rated players in the field when the event started.
• Three-Body and Event Horizon. Three wins, and ten.
• Standing Wave. Played the house weekly four weeks running. More on that below.

For organizers:

• Ion Trap. Ran a tournament of eight or more players to a winner.
• Optical Lattice. Ran five, or one with sixteen players.
• Synchrotron. Ran one four weeks in a row.
• Collider. Ran twenty-five, or one with thirty-two players.

The names are containers that hold particles. A trap holds a handful, a lattice holds a grid of them, a collider holds a beam. Open any badge in the game to see it move.

What’s next

A house-run weekly arena, same slot every week, free to enter. That’s the event you can plan your Saturday around, and it’s what Standing Wave is waiting for. We’re giving the tournament system a little live time first, so the weekly starts once the first community events have run.

Until then, the calendar is yours. Run something, and bring a friend.

Bring a friend, and they’ll know where to start

A tournament is only as good as the people in it, so 1.5.0 makes the first hour friendlier for whoever you bring along.

The first local game now walks you through the board, the move log, and how to split and merge, one control at a time. Skip it if you already know the game, or replay it from the game menu whenever you want a refresher.

There’s also a new notation guide in Learn. Quantum Chess notation has to write down things ordinary chess never does, like a piece going to two squares at once or a measurement coming up empty. The guide explains every symbol the move log uses, so you can read a game back after the fact.

Take it back

Undo comes to more games. Against the computer, take back your last move. If the AI has already replied, its reply goes too, and it’s your move again.

In casual online games you can ask your opponent for a takeback. They get a prompt to allow or decline, and if they allow it the board rewinds for both of you. Ranked, league and tournament games stay final.

Smaller things

• The Split and Merge buttons under the board are now off by default. Turn them on from the game menu, or just play with a keyboard or a controller and they come on by themselves. The drag gesture still works either way.
• A fully present piece capturing along a clear path always succeeds, so the measurement animation no longer plays for it. It still plays whenever superposition is involved, on either side of the capture.
• Some back buttons went forward instead of back, so you could bounce between two screens and never reach home. Fixed. Opening a shared link and pressing back now takes you into the app instead of out of it.
• Premium players can set the Quantum Lab to any Alchemy League season’s rules, phase dial included.
• Every premium prompt has a sign-in button when you’re signed out.
• Sign out and switch account from your own profile.

Full notes are in the changelog.