Live on iOS & Android

The game chess came from.

Chaturang is the 8th-century Indian board game widely considered the earliest known form of chess. The pieces are weaker, there is no castling, and the King has a single once-per-game Knight leap. Play it against an AI tuned over hundreds of thousands of self-play positions. Live now on the App Store and Google Play.

Download on the App Store Get it on Google Play

Chaturang card-pick screen — choose your side

What it is

A 1,200-year-old game, played the way it was meant to be.

Chaturang spread from India along the trade routes and slowly became the chess the world plays today. Chaturang restores the original: the slower pieces, the diagonally-opposed Kings, the absence of castling. It is not a chess clone with a coat of paint — it is the game chess grew out of, with its own tactics and its own rhythm.

Built by Neurantra, quiet by design.

Chaturang asks for nothing: no account, no signup, no tracking beyond what ad serving requires. Everything — your coins, your streak, your lifetime stats — lives on your device. It is a single, finished game with a learned opponent, presented in a Mughal-themed aesthetic of ornate piece silhouettes and the Kalam typeface.

Inside the game

The opponent

An AI that learned the game, not memorized it.

Chaturang's engine was tuned over hundreds of thousands of self-play positions, with a Chaturang-specific evaluation rather than a chess engine in disguise. Three difficulty levels: Easy beats casual players who blunder and is ideal for learning; Medium unlocks after three Easy wins and gives a real fight; Hard unlocks after five Medium wins and searches six plies deep. King-and-Rook versus lone King endgames are played perfectly, from a built-in tablebase computed by retrograde analysis.

Easy · Medium · Hard — earned, not just selected

Chaturang mid-game board with ornate piece silhouettes

Chaturang How to Play screen explaining piece movement

Not chess

Its 8th-century ancestor, rules and all.

Chaturang is played on an uncheckered 8×8 board, the Ashtāpada, with the two Kings starting diagonally opposite. The pieces are weaker than their chess descendants: the Mantri (Counsellor) moves a single square diagonally — nothing like a Queen — and the Gaja (Elephant) jumps exactly two squares diagonally, reaching only eight squares on the whole board. There is no castling. The one tactical lifeline is the Raja's once-per-game Knight-like leap, which can even escape check — a single move that shapes the whole game.

Raja · Mantri · Gaja · Rook · Knight · pawns

The depth

Set the game you want to play.

Every game opens with a royal card-pick ceremony to reveal your side. From there, tune the challenge: turn on optional 5-minute blitz clocks, or cap the game with a move-count limit that draws if reached. Difficulty tiers unlock as you win, so the game grows with you rather than handing you everything at once.

Card-pick ceremony · blitz clocks · move-limit mode

Chaturang settings — difficulty tiers, timed game, move limit

Chaturang statistics screen — coins, games, streaks

The loop

Hints when you need them, streaks to keep.

Stuck? Spend coins on a hint and the engine shows you its recommended move, highlighted on the board. Earn coins back by winning, drawing, or watching an ad. A day-streak counter and lifetime stats track every game — all of it wrapped in a Mughal-themed aesthetic with ornate piece silhouettes and the Kalam typeface. No accounts, no signup, no tracking beyond what ad serving requires.