Standard chess, with one twist. Pick a variant, pick a color, and play against a simple bot.
SpecialChess is standard chess with one rule changed, built as a way to explore how a single tweak can reshape strategy without touching the rest of the game. Both variants keep normal chess notation, normal check/checkmate rules, and the standard board — only the move mechanic itself is different.
Every move you make is legal only if the resulting position doesn't leave your own king in check — same as normal chess. The twist: a move "snaps back" to its original square if a legal alternative existed that the engine judges safer, encouraging more deliberate, defensive play and punishing careless piece placement more than standard chess does.
Each side gets two moves per turn instead of one (as long as the first move doesn't deliver check). This roughly doubles the tempo of the game — tactics that would normally take two or three turns to set up can now happen in a single turn, which rewards players who calculate combinations rather than develop slowly.
You play against a lightweight bot with adjustable difficulty implicit in the variant rules — there's no login, no game is saved server-side, and no two games are tracked or linked to you.