Pocket Shuffle Chess

A new way to play and create with chess

Board Games

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We built a chess game. Then we accidentally built a content tool around it. Pocket Shuffle Chess started with a fairly simple question: Can we make chess faster, less dependent on memorised openings, and different enough that even experienced players have to think from move one? We are not trying to build another Chess.com. This distinction matters to us. Chess.com, Lichess and other platforms already do an incredible job of providing a place to play traditional chess. We aren't trying to recreate that. Our goal is to see whether Pocket Shuffle Chess can establish itself as a chess variant of its own. A format people recognise as chess, but play differently. But building the game turned out to be only half the problem. The other half was getting people to discover it. Our first approach was the obvious one. Build the product → put it online → tell people about it. It didn't work particularly well. A new chess variant has an additional problem. Before someone decides whether they like it, they first have to understand what it is. So instead of repeatedly trying to explain Pocket Shuffle Chess, we started creating things chess players already consume every day: CHESS CONTENT So we created a channel to aid our distribution People started watching. And they kept watching. What began as a distribution experiment became a chess content channel of its own. “We stopped advertising a chess game and started making chess content.” Then something happened that was much more important to us. The content started generating reach. Across the videos we created on multiple platforms, our channels went on to generate nearly 10 million views and attract 1,000+ active users to the game. The Creator Problem: What started as a distribution experiment reached millions of views. The product didn't find the content. The content started finding the audience for the product. But then we ran into another problem. Chess content is simple to consume. It isn't always simple to create. Creating one video meant repeatedly setting up chess positions, Moving pieces, Recreating puzzles, Highlighting important squares, Drawing arrows, Showing possible moves, Creating annotations, Recording the board, Taking those recordings into the editing process, And then doing the same thing again for the next video. Once you are creating content regularly, those small steps become a lot of work. So we started building something internally to make our own process easier.That eventually became Sandbox. THE SANDBOX: Sandbox wasn't originally built because we decided the world needed another creator tool. We built it because we needed it. Sandbox lets us set up chess positions, create puzzles, move pieces around, add the visual explanations needed for the position and prepare the chess part of a video without rebuilding everything manually. That shortened one of the most repetitive parts of our content workflow. And once we started using it, another thought came up: Why should this only be useful to us? There are thousands of people creating chess Shorts, Reels, tutorials, puzzles and videos. They are solving variations on the same problem. Set up a position → Explain it visually → Record it →Turn it into content. So Sandbox gradually moved from being an internal tool into something we think other chess creators could use too. We started by building a chess variant. Then we struggled to distribute it. That made us build a content channel and it helped us reach nearly 10millions views. Producing those videos repeatedly exposed a completely different problem. Solving that problem made us build Sandbox. And Sandbox made us realise that the creator side of chess might be just as interesting as the game itself. So we're not launching Pocket Shuffle Chess as “the next Chess.com.” We're trying to establish a new chess variant. Now we want to put both in front of people who can take them apart. - Play the game. - Try the Sandbox. - Create something. And tell us what you think this should become next.