Ember Chess has grown up fast

Ember Chess has grown up fast

A lot has changed since the first Ember update.

What was already a functioning chess platform has expanded into something much closer to the full experience I originally wanted Ember to become.

Since the last update, Ember has gained matchmaking, friends and challenges, tournaments, live spectating, detailed competitive statistics, new training tools, notifications, accessibility improvements, and an entire puzzle platform.

Here is what is new.

Quick Play matchmaking

You no longer need to manually find someone and challenge them to get a human game started.

Quick Play matchmaking is now live for both Rated and Casual games.

You can choose your time control, enter the queue, and Ember will look for another compatible player.

Matchmaking takes rating and provisional status into account, gradually expands the acceptable rating range while you wait, and avoids pairing players who have blocked each other.

Once a match is found, both players are connected to the game and the clocks begin when both sides are ready.

Rematches are also supported after normal games.

Friends, profiles, and direct challenges

The social side of Ember has expanded quite a bit.

Players can now:

• send and accept friend requests
• maintain a friends list
• block other users
• see presence where privacy settings allow it
• challenge players directly to Rated or Casual games
• view richer player profiles
• review public completed games

Profiles are tied to permanent account identities rather than usernames, so changing a username does not break old game history.

Profiles also support custom profile pictures and existing Ember titles and identity badges.

Tournaments are live

Ember now has a full tournament system.

Players can create Community tournaments, while authorized staff can create Ember Official events.

Current formats include:

• Swiss
• Round Robin

Tournaments support persistent rounds, pairings, standings, withdrawals, byes, color balancing, tie-breaks, tournament game history, and automatic advancement once a round has finished.

Community tournaments are Casual.

Ember Official tournaments can also support Rated play.

Tournament history survives server restarts and remains connected to the normal Ember game and rating systems.

Watch live games

Ember now has a dedicated Watch area.

Public tournament games can be watched live.

Normal games can also be spectated when both players choose to allow it, and either player can revoke that permission.

Spectators can follow:

• the live board
• moves
• clocks
• player identities

Game chat remains private.

The spectator board is completely read-only.

Core game play received a major polish pass

A lot of smaller things have changed inside the actual chessboard experience.

Ember now supports:

• multiple queued premoves
• resign confirmation
• game aborts before the first move
• low-time warnings below 20 seconds
• live connection-status indicators
• bounded server-controlled lag compensation
• Auto-Queen
• Alt override for underpromotion
• improved bot-game takebacks
• keyboard chessboard controls

Premoves can now queue several moves ahead and are revalidated against the actual position as the game changes.

Connection indicators use real server connection state rather than simply guessing from what the browser sees.

Clock handling was also audited and now provides a small, bounded amount of compensation for measured network transit without trusting client-reported timing.

Competitive stats and leaderboards

Player progression has gotten much deeper.

Profiles now include statistics such as:

• rating history
• tracked peak rating
• recent Rated form
• win streaks
• results by color
• results by time control
• opening performance
• head-to-head records

There are also Global and Friends leaderboards for:

• Bullet
• Blitz
• Rapid
• Classical

Provisional ratings remain separate until placement is complete, and deleted, banned, or internal QA accounts do not appear as normal ranked players.

Opening statistics also let you jump directly into the games where you played a particular opening.

Opening recognition is much smarter

Ember's original opening detection worked well for exact move sequences but could stop recognizing theory too early when an opening was reached through a different move order.

That system has now been rebuilt around canonical chess positions.

This means normal transpositions and alternate move orders can still remain inside known opening theory when the resulting position is recognized by Ember's opening database.

That improvement affects both:

• Game Review
• player opening statistics

Game Review still keeps a clean continuous opening sequence and marks a single Last book move once the game genuinely leaves known theory.

Practice positions from Game Review

Game Review is no longer only something you look at after a game.

You can now take positions from a review and actually play them.

Practice from here lets you start from an exact reviewed position and continue playing against the engine.

If one of your moves was classified as a Mistake or Blunder, Retry this position lets you go back to the position before that move and try something different.

You can also paste any valid FEN and start a practice session from it.

Practice games are completely separate from competitive play and do not affect:

• chess ratings
• leaderboards
• records
• streaks
• titles
• tournament statistics

Puzzle Training is live

This is probably the biggest new training feature so far.

Ember now has a catalog of 306,759 curated chess puzzles.

The puzzle system includes:

• Adaptive puzzles
• a separate Puzzle Rating
• themed training
• a Daily Puzzle
• puzzle history and progression
• private puzzles generated from your own reviewed games

Adaptive mode selects puzzles around your current Puzzle Rating and adjusts as you solve or fail them.

Puzzle Rating is completely separate from your normal Bullet, Blitz, Rapid, and Classical ratings.

Theme training lets you focus on particular tactical ideas without affecting your Puzzle Rating.

Puzzles from your own games

Ember can also turn positions from your own reviewed games into private training puzzles.

When Game Review finds a promising missed tactical opportunity, Ember can validate the position and create a puzzle where you get another chance to find the better move.

Not every mistake becomes a puzzle.

The generator filters out ambiguous, unstable, trivial, or poor training positions and prioritizes positions with a clear useful solution.

These puzzles remain private to your account.

The goal is to eventually make Ember training increasingly personal instead of only giving everyone the same random positions.

Notifications

Ember now has an in-app notification system.

Notifications can surface important events such as:

• friend requests
• accepted requests
• challenges
• tournament activity
• titles
• account or moderation updates
• important Ember announcements

Notifications are stored per account and include unread tracking.

They are also authorization protected so another user cannot access or manipulate your notification history.

Help and Feedback

There is now a built-in Help & Feedback system.

You can submit:

• bugs
• suggestions
• general feedback
• account or support requests

Submissions can include safe diagnostic context such as the Ember build, page, device type, and relevant game ID when appropriate.

You can also view the status of your own submissions.

This makes it much easier for people testing Ember to report something strange without needing to find me somewhere else first.

Security, privacy, and accessibility

A lot of work has also gone into areas that are much less visible than puzzles or tournaments.

Ember recently went through a larger platform-trust and security pass covering areas such as:

• authorization boundaries
• session security
• WebSocket session revocation
• private-file protection
• account deletion
• data retention
• privacy disclosures
• uploads
• rate limiting
• security headers
• staff permissions

The Privacy Policy was also updated to better reflect how Ember currently handles player data and features.

Accessibility received another pass as well.

The chessboard can now be operated with a keyboard, important controls use proper focus behavior and accessible labels, and connection states do not rely on color alone.

There is still more accessibility work I want to do over time, but this was a significant step forward.

Still building

There is a lot more I want to build.

Some of the larger ideas still ahead include deeper opening training, more personalized training systems, improvements to computer opponents, and eventually a much more capable chess coach built around Ember's existing engine analysis.

But Ember is now at the point where the most useful thing I can get is more people actually using it.

Play games.

Try matchmaking.

Join or create tournaments.

Solve puzzles.

Review your games.

Practice your mistakes.

Try things I probably did not think to try.

And if something breaks, feels confusing, or you think it could simply be better, send feedback through Ember.

Every extra person using the platform helps expose things that automated testing never will.

Thanks to everyone who has checked Ember out while it is still growing.

There is always another game.