What if your army was the factory?

Chess, on the same sixty-four squares as a working factory. Captured pieces leave scrap where they died. Park a pawn on the heap to mine it, lay belt to haul the ore to a bishop to be refined, and on to a rook that smelts it into new pieces.

Every turn is a chess move plus two belt parts — so industry never costs you tempo. It costs you board space.

That second sentence is the whole design. Factory Chess is a chess variant in the strict sense — the pieces move the way they always have, and check is still check — grafted onto an automation game in the equally strict sense: belts route material, pieces transform it, and a lane you laid three turns ago keeps producing whether or not you're watching it. The resource management isn't a layer sitting on top of the chess; it is the chess. The belts you lay eat the board you fight on, and a pawn parked on a heap is a pawn off the front line.

So familiar judgements change weight. A material lead stops being a count and becomes future production, if you can hold the ground long enough to process it. A sacrifice can be an investment, if the scrap it leaves falls where you can work it. And a winning position can rot while you press the attack, because the factory behind it needs tending too.

The board in this section is a recorded game — the pieces, the belts, the cargo in motion are all real output from the engine. The playable build is at factorychess.com: free, in the browser, nothing to install, and you play against that same engine, which has to weigh the same questions you do.

It is a prototype and we are looking for players rather than customers. Things will be rough and some of them will be wrong, and that is the part we want to hear about. The fastest way to understand it is to lose one game to your own conveyor belts.