How will the new app compare to other chess-themed games?
Magnus Carlsen has made millions in his past online chess ventures after he sold Play Magnus, an app that allows players to compete against chess bots, to Chess.com for $80 million. So when he announced his new app, Fantasy Chess, I was curious as to how it would compare to his previous one.
If you’ve never heard of Magnus Carlsen, he is the five-time chess world champion and currently the highest-rated chess player. The Play Magnus Group was a company he created that made bots of himself at different ages that you can play against.
Then, in the spring of 2023, he announced that he would create a new joint venture called Pawn with the venture builder Iterate. The first app that Pawn was going to create would be Fantasy Chess. When it was first released, I thought it would be a big deal since it was coming right after a huge boom in chess popularity and could make people more excited about professional tournaments. On October 11, the beta version of Fantasy Chess opened to the public for the Qatar Masters chess tournament.
The app is supposed to be the fantasy football of chess. At the beginning of each tournament, users pick certain pieces on the chess board and assign a player to each. By doing this, they are predicting the players will use that piece. Then for every action that the player’s pieces take, they get points.
When I was first making my picks, I found it difficult to decide which pieces to choose for each player. I also found that it made players’ wins less exciting if they did not use your piece. I still think enjoyment can be found in other ways using the app, such as analyzing the strategies of players and deciding your picks based on that, but I don’t think most people will be doing that.
Overall, I think that it is very hard to do a fantasy league for something like chess. There is no consistent schedule every week and there are only so many top players that compete at a lot of events. This means picks have to be done at every tournament and usually whoever is the highest-ranked wins so there is no reason to pick anyone except the highest-ranked players. So Fantasy Chess made you choose chess pieces, but that got too specific and needed to be more interesting. It takes a lot to begin predicting what pieces a certain player will use.
In February 2024, Fantasy Chess teamed up with Chess.com to create Chess Prophet. Chess Prophet revolves around the online tournament Titled Tuesday. Every Tuesday you can go on and pick who you think will win or if you think that game will be a draw. Depending on whether you get your picks correct, you get points. At the end of each month and each year, the top three will receive prizes, including cash, chess boards signed by Magnus Carlsen, and a paid trip to meet Magnus Carlsen.
This was Fantasy Chess moving from the beta stage into something more finished. Chess Prophet is definitely better than Fantasy Chess because the predicting is linked to the games, not the pieces, but it still has some issues. You can only predict the games when the schedule between the players is chosen and since this is an online tournament, the schedule is chosen a few hours before on the day of the tournament meaning you can only have a short window to predict Tuesday. This may be the biggest inconvenience about the whole app.
I don’t think Fantasy Chess will ever be as mainstream as Play Magnus, but I think it is a promising first start for Pawn. I am very excited to see what else they create. And if they manage to create another group of games like Fantasy Chess, that would be very exciting.
Students of the Sidewalk 