Improved multiplayer chess clock
TLDR; I created a multiplayer chess clock which is hosted here: chess-clock.harmont.xyz
The last couple of years me and my friends have been using Multi Player Chess Clock to limit how long our board game nights go on for. It’s great, intuitive and easy to use. But it has two limitations that required building a replacement.
- It does not support passing and consequently pass turn order.
- It’s not open source, and therefore I could not post a PR for above features.
Turn order: pass order
In some games the order in the subsequent round is determined by factors in the current round. In pass order, this is specifically set by the order in which the players are passing.
For example if the initial turn order is
- Player A
- Player B
- Player C
And after each of them doing some turns first Player B passes. Then after some more turns Player A decides to pass. Then finally Player C passes, and ends the round.
The next round will have this order:
- Player B
- Player C
- Player A
Features
- multi-device, and player turn alerts for any device
- history of previously connected rooms
- pausing and automatic pause when devices disconnect
- QR-code to join
Why not 1 device = 1 player?
Because this is a table tool, not a login system. Requiring every player to pair a phone makes a board game depend on batteries, Wi-Fi, browser state, and everyone completing a join flow before play can continue. It also breaks the perfectly normal cases where one tablet is shared or one person’s phone dies.
Treating devices as unrestricted remotes keeps the physical game authoritative: use one shared screen, a phone per player, or any mix in between. Players and their clocks belong to the room; devices merely control them.
I hope this can help others as much as multi player chess clock has helped me so far. I’d happily take feature requests, PRs and bug reports here