How to play Dice Chess

The game at a glance

• The board, the pieces, and the starting position are standard chess. White moves first.
• Each turn starts with a roll of three dice. Each die shows a piece type: pawn, knight, bishop, rook, queen, or king.
• You make up to three moves in one turn. Each move is paid for with one die showing the type of the piece you move.
• You win by capturing the king. There is no check and no checkmate — the king is a piece you take, like any other.

The three dice

The dice are rolled fresh at the start of every turn, before you move. A die showing knight lets you move a knight — any one of yours. Doubles and triples are real: two pawn dice mean two pawn moves, by two different pawns or by the same pawn twice. Each die pays for exactly one move and is then spent for the rest of the turn.

One exception spends two dice at once: castling needs both a king die and a rook die (see below).

Your turn: play as many dice as you can

The defining rule of this dialect: you must spend as many dice as the position allows. You may not stop early and you may not skip a die you could legally use. If some sequence of moves uses all three dice, every legal turn uses all three; if at most two can be used, every legal turn uses two — and so on.

This has teeth. Suppose the game just started and you roll pawn, knight, bishop. Playing a7–a6-style rook-pawn moves is illegal here: they don't open a diagonal, your bishop stays locked in, and the turn would waste a die. Only pawn moves that free the bishop (or move orders that still spend all three dice) are legal. Plan the whole turn before touching a piece.

• Capturing the king overrides everything. A move that takes the king is always legal — even if it leaves dice unused — and ends the game on the spot.
• No legal move at all? You pass. If the roll gives you nothing — say, bishop, rook, queen on the very first turn, when none of those pieces can move — the turn is passed automatically. It happens instantly and costs you no clock time.
• The count is in dice, not moves: castling spends two dice with a single move, and counts toward the maximum accordingly.

Winning the game

You win when any of these happens:

• You capture the king. Attacking it is not enough — you need a die for the attacking piece on the turn you take it.
• Your opponent resigns. Resigning is allowed at any moment.
• Your opponent runs out of time (see time controls).

No check, no checkmate

If you come from chess, this is the part to unlearn. Because the game ends by capturing the king, the entire concept of check does not exist:

• Your king may move to an attacked square, and may be left under attack.
• “Pinned” pieces don't exist — any piece may move regardless of what it exposes.
• Castling out of, through, or into an attacked square is perfectly legal.
• There is no stalemate: a player with no legal moves simply passes, and the game goes on.

An attacked king is in danger, not in a rules-defined state. Whether the attacker can actually cash in depends on the next roll — that tension is the heart of the game.

Castling, promotion, en passant

Draws

Time controls

• Live games are played with a clock. The lobby offers blitz (3+2, 5+3, 5+5, 5 min) and rapid (10+5, 10+10, 15+10, 10 min) controls.
• The increment is added once per completed turn, not per move within it.
• Forced passes are instant and free — a passed turn costs no time.
• Thinking about a draw offer runs your clock, like any other decision.
• A fallen flag is always a loss. There is no insufficient-material exception: if your time runs out against a lone king, you lose.
• If you disconnect, you have a grace period of about 30 seconds to come back; after that the game is forfeited.

Provably fair dice

You never have to trust our dice — you can check them. Before a game starts, the server publishes a cryptographic commitment (a SHA-256 hash) to a secret seed. Both players then contribute random seeds of their own. Every roll of the game is derived deterministically from those seeds and the turn number — the dice are fixed before the first move and cannot depend on the position, your moves, or who is winning. The moment the game ends, the server reveals its seed, and anyone can recompute every roll and verify it matches the commitment published up front.

The replay page of every finished live game shows the commitment, the revealed seed, and both players' seeds, ready to copy. The full verification procedure, with runnable code, is in our provably-fair documentation.

How other sites differ

Dice Chess is played on a handful of sites, and the rules differ in places — mostly around what's layered on top of the moves, rather than the moves themselves. This page documents the dialect our open-source engine enforces; here is how the sites we've studied compare.

• dicechess.com — the core movement rules match this dialect, including the maximum-dice rule and the two-dice castling; we verified this by replaying tens of thousands of its publicly played games through our engine, move for move. On top of the moves it adds a backgammon-style doubling cube and pot-based stakes, so a game there can also end by declining a double.
• beturanga.com — the games in our sample, classic and Fischer-random alike, replay cleanly under this dialect's movement rules as well. It additionally offers Chess960 (Fischer-random) starting positions, which this site does not, and runs real-money-style betting formats.
• This site — the reference dialect described above, with no stakes and no cube: classic starting position, both-dice castling, mandatory maximum, en passant alive for the whole reply turn, provably fair rolls.

Found a rules difference we haven't documented — here or elsewhere? Please open an issue — documenting the dialects accurately is part of this project's mission.