onchain board games
stake, play, win
The problem onchain board games solves
Problem Statement
The on-chain economy, while revolutionary, remains overwhelmingly powered by speculative assets and trading. Even on-chain games lean heavily into this speculative nature, treating gameplay as a vehicle for token appreciation rather than rewarding pure skill. To truly grow the pie, we need to unlock a different financial primitive: economies where anyone, anywhere, can earn based on the skills they already have, playing games they genuinely enjoy.
The opportunity is massive. Chess.com serves 150 million users and generates over $100M annually, with 35 million games played daily. The global online board games market stands at $2.3 billion and growing. Yet these platforms operate as centralized monopolies with opaque systems, payment friction, and geographic restrictions. Meanwhile, blockchain’s promise of new financial primitives remains unfulfilled for everyday activities. Millions of players worldwide have the skills to compete and earn, but no trustless, globally accessible infrastructure exists to enable it.
Our Solution
We’re building foundational infrastructure on Base for a new class of on-chain economies centered on Chess and Checkers, classic games of pure skill.
At its core, players can stake and compete in head-to-head matches. The experience is seamless: players stake funds on-chain through our escrow contract, play through our optimized off-chain game engine for instant, responsive gameplay, and cryptographically sign match results off-chain using EIP-712 signatures before automatic settlement on-chain. Winners receive payouts instantly and trustlessly. We use Privy for authentication, enabling familiar email/social login that abstracts away wallet complexity, critical for onboarding mainstream users who’ve never touched crypto.
This architecture delivers web2 performance with web3 trustlessness. Players get the responsive gameplay they expect from Chess.com, but with verifiable fairness, instant settlement, and no platform acting as middleman for their funds.
But individual matches alone don’t grow the pie. Real economic expansion happens when communities can create their own competitive venues.
Key Innovation: Tournament-as-a-Service - Infrastructure for Micro-Economies
Consider the Chicago Chess Center or similar organisations: weekly tournaments create genuine economic activity through entry fees, prizes, and community engagement. This is a proven model for building sustainable, skill-based economies, but it’s constrained by geography, manual overhead, and lack of verifiable systems. More importantly, it can’t scale globally.
We’re democratizing this economic model. Our Tournament-as-a-Service infrastructure lets anyone, anywhere, launch competitive venues: DAOs running weekly member tournaments, content creators hosting championships for their communities, local gaming clubs organizing international competitions, or brands sponsoring skill-based events with provably fair outcomes. Each tournament is a new micro-economy where players create value through skill, organizers build communities, and meaningful economic activity happens beyond speculation.
Our infrastructure provides:
• Zero technical barriers to tournament creation
• Cryptographically verifiable results with off-chain performance and on-chain trustlessness
• Global accessibility removing geographic constraints
• Automated operations from registration to prize distribution
• Gasless prize claims and familiar login (Privy), onboarding mainstream users frictionlessly
Impact
Chess.com proves the demand: 150 million users playing 35 million games daily. We’re providing the infrastructure to tap into this $2.3 billion online board games market with a superior model: trustless, globally accessible, and community-owned. Imagine 10,000 weekly tournaments across every timezone, distributing prizes based purely on merit, with every result verifiable on-chain. We’re not just building a game. We’re providing the infrastructure for thousands of skill-based micro-economies to flourish on Base, proving blockchain can create sustainable value beyond speculation.
Challenges I ran into
Challenges & Solutions: Building Through Iteration
Coming from a non-dev background, I approached this project as a journey of discovery rather than solving predefined problems. I built, tested as a user, identified gaps, and iterated, wearing both creator and user hats simultaneously.
Challenge 1: From Basic Escrow to Production-Ready Smart Contract
My first escrow contract was embarrassingly simple: check if a user has USDC, deduct it when they create a match, pay out the winner. No approvals, minimal on-chain interaction, just the bare minimum to make funds move.
The wake-up call came when I had to submit contract for Base's free security review. My own internal audit revealed critical vulnerabilities: no reentrancy protection, no emergency pause mechanism, no role-based access controls. I had built a game, not a secure onchain system.
Solution: I rebuilt from the ground up using OpenZeppelin standards. Added reentrancy guards, pausable functionality, proper approval flows, and separated roles (ADMIN, SIGNER, RELAYER) for defense-in-depth security. The contract evolved from "barely functional" to production-ready, handling not just escrow and disbursement but the complete UX you'd expect from an onchain application.
Challenge 2: Players Gaming the System
During testing with a friend, I was winning when he simply closed his browser, avoiding the loss entirely. No consequences, no record, just gone. Players would exploit any escape hatch to preserve stats or avoid losing stakes.
Solution: Implemented comprehensive match state management with forfeit mechanisms, timeout penalties, draw offers requiring mutual consent, and disconnect handling that doesn't punish network issues but does penalize rage-quits. Every match now reaches a definitive, recorded conclusion.
Challenge 3: Server Crashes and the Reality of Scale
During AI gameplay testing (practice mode), the server kept crashing. I'd built on free-tier infrastructure, and when players selected higher AI difficulty (analyzing multiple moves deep), the heap would overflow and crash the entire server, taking down all active games.
I realized: if one AI game could crash the server, there was no path to handling real traffic.
Solution: I used performance optimizer subagent to analyze performance bottlenecks. The solution: reduce AI computational depth to sustainable levels (which i didnt like, because that would make it dumber) and implement aggressive caching. I integrated Upstash Redis to cache game states and AI calculations, and optimized the AI queue to distribute computational load.
The mindset shift was critical: I stopped thinking "make one game work" and started thinking "make 1000 concurrent games work." Free-tier constraints forced me to build efficiently from the start. Now the platform handles 1000+ concurrent players with sub-100ms response times.
Challenge 4: From Feature to Infrastructure - The Tournament Evolution
Tournaments weren't part of the original vision. They emerged when I was writing GTM plans and thought "hosting tournaments would be great marketing." So I built platform-hosted tournaments as a feature.
But then I asked: what does this mean in practice? The platform seeding and hosting every tournament? That's not scalable, that's a bottleneck. I'd become the centralized party I was trying to replace.
Solution: I flipped the model entirely. Instead of tournaments as a platform feature, I built Tournament-as-a-Service infrastructure. Anyone can create tournaments through a plug-and-play module. I don't host tournaments, I provide the tools for communities to host their own. This transformed a marketing tactic into the platform's most powerful feature: democratized tournament creation that enables thousands of micro-economies to flourish independently.
Challenge 5: Crypto Complexity as an Onboarding Barrier
Early testers who weren't crypto-native struggled with wallet setup, gas fees, and transaction signing. The game was smooth, but the crypto layer was friction.
Solution: Integrated Privy for authentication (email/social login), implemented gasless transactions via relayer infrastructure, and designed the UX so users could play without understanding they're using blockchain. The technology became invisible, the experience became accessible.
Every "problem" was really a discovery from using the platform as a player would. Friend rage-quits? Build forfeit handling. Server crashes under AI load? Optimize for 1000 concurrent players. Marketing needs tournaments? Build tournament infrastructure. Crypto is scary? Abstract it away.
This iterate-as-you-go approach, informed by real usage, shaped a platform that's not just technically sound but genuinely user-centered. The challenges weren't bugs to fix, they were insights that evolved the vision from "a game with escrow" to "infrastructure for skill-based micro-economies."
Technologies used
Cheer Project
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