Infinite Armada Chess

By Devansh Chopra. MSci Computer Science dissertation, University of St Andrews, 2025/26.

An N-board chess variant inspired by Randall Munroe's XKCD #3020. One human plays the centre board and Stockfish engines play the surrounding boards. Captured pieces flow unidirectionally around a ring of N boards, so material is always in motion between the games. Project is shipped in two phases- Phase 1 is a rule based 4 player two board bughouse and Phase 2 is the N-board ring variant.

Acknowledgements

• John DiIorio — original bughouse repository that this project is built on.
• Stockfish — engine moves and evaluation.
• Lichess — Chessground for board rendering.
• Supabase — managed Postgres and authentication.
• Professor Richard Connor — supervision throughout the project.

How to run?

./run.sh

Then open http://localhost:1000. run.sh works on macOS and Linux.

Build it

npm install
npm run build

Run the tests

npm test

Five regression files, 150 assertions across rule layer, drop pipeline, team Elo, engine sanity and infinite mode integration.