Regular visitors of the MyGaming forum may have come across our thread dedicated to the ChessConquest.com community.
Chess Conquest is a South African-born gaming website dedicated to one of the oldest competitive multiplayer games. It was launched at the end of September 2011, during the rAge 2011 expo.
Players can join the site for free at this point, and gain access to gameplay performance statistics tracking, and online tournaments among the community.
Chess matches can be completed quickly in real-time, or over a few days – as players login when convenient to post their next move against their opponent. To this end, players can have 5 concurrent games on the go.
In future, a subscription model will be introduced that allows players to have more games running, along with other features.
The site has been going from strength to strength, so we caught up with Chess Conquest founder, Alwyn Bester, to find out where the website is heading next.
“Chess Conquest currently has just under 4,000 registered players, with an average of 30 new players joining each day. It is estimated that 3,7% of the players turn out to be highly active, and one of our main goals is to improve this figure with future upgrades to the website. Tournaments usually attract between 30 and 70 players,” said Bester.
“We host three types of tournaments on a regular basis, namely the Speed Kings (weekly); the Medium Velocity (fortnightly); and the Epic Deep Thought (monthly). Speed Kings are for faster players and games have a very short time limit. Medium Velocity tournaments provides players with a more relaxed playing pace, whereas the Epic Deep Thought tournaments are for players who really wants to take their time with their moves. Currently tournaments are not prized,” continued Bester.
Discussing goals for Chess Conquest, Bester said “We want to make people aware of the intellectual benefits of playing chess, and to grow the sport of chess.”
“Our short-term plans are to constantly improve ChessConquest, based on the feedback we receive from players. We take the comments of our players very seriously, and believe that if we listen closely enough to our users, ChessConquest will automatically be successful.”
“Our long-term plans are to take game play to the next level with 3D graphics and animation. Unfortunately, I cannot give away too much information on this yet, since we are only in the planning phase of such upgrades.”
“A feature we are considering is a concept of ‘clans’, where players can team together and challenge other clans. We have also set a goal for ourselves to improve the current messaging mechanism of ChessConquest, to make it easier for players to chat with each other,” said Bester.
Asked to differentiate Chess Conquest from the many other online chess websites out there, Bester said: “We think we’ve done a good job at keeping ChessConquest plain and simple. The interface is designed to be easy enough for any player to use. Our main goal is to ensure that as many players as possible find the gaming experience of playing at ChessConquest enjoyable. We’ve focused at lot on ensuring that game play is of high quality.”
As for that unique South African allure, Bester said that “since ChessConquest is developed in South Africa, a large portion of the player database consists of South African players. From a social perspective, it makes it very easy to engage with opponents if you are South African.”
Bester added that they have started marketing ChessConquest internationally, since playing against foreign players adds a lot to the fun factor of playing chess online.
Whether newcomer or chess professional, check out Chess Conquest on their website: Chess Conquest website
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