Chess on a Donut/Torus and Deep-Dive
Details
- External ID
- 46089344
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Chess on a Donut/Torus and Deep-Dive
- Website domain
- mchess.io
- Launched
- Nov. 29, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 24
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7270742358078602
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
Hey there! I just finished a youtube video explaining our donut chess in detail: https://youtu.be/iRcfHCPFgkMSo I thought it'd be cool to show it off here too- it can be played around with at mchess.io/donut - you can also set up an AI or online game on the site.This is all indie dev work from a couple friends and myself.
Enrichment
- Theme
- AI agent games and chess tools
- Vertical
- Media & entertainment
- Function
- Vertical SaaS
- Audience
- B2C
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- chess game on a torus topology
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Partial A 3D frontend using Three.js can be vibe-coded, but implementing non-Euclidean board topology and corresponding chess move-generation rules and minimax/evaluation AI requires specialized mathematical algorithms.
What it would actually take: The stack would combine Three.js/WebGL for 3D toroidal rendering with a custom move generation engine that implements wrap-around boundary conditions across toroidal coordinates. The hard part is redefining chess rules (raycasting for bishops/rooks/queens wrapping endlessly or looping, check/checkmate detection on cyclic graphs) and adapting minimax/alpha-beta search or MCTS heuristics to evaluate a board where conventional positional heuristics fail.
Discussion
13 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Tetris on a Torus (benjoffe.com), Chedoku chess puzzles
Concerns raised: Gimbal lock during torus rotation prevents continuous movement, Not obvious the torus is 3D and rotatable on page load, White queen/king not on correct colors (chess rule confusion), Pieces feel more like cylinder than true torus topology
Feature requests: Rotate pieces along circular axis (inside doughnut hole to outside), Idle animation: random gentle rotation with relaxation back, Auto-rotate on page load to demonstrate interactivity, Eliminated piece rows reappear randomly at top, Rotation mechanism that avoids gimbal lock (quaternions or alternative)
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 112 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #50 of 113 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 31 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Chess-TUI Play Lichess games in your terminal (Rust) · hn · 2025-12-11 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Chess4D · ph · 2026-09-08 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- I trained a chess engine to play like humans · hn · 2026-05-10 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.47
- Blindfold Chess App · hn · 2025-11-18 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
- Can a person's chess mind outlive them? An attempt with 41 masters · hn · 2026-04-30 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.46
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a vertical saas tool for Insurance yet.