Like many of you, I’ve been trying to make the best of quarantine by playing Kings of War online via Universal Battle 2. The ability to see the angles and ranges for each unit and easily undo speculative moves makes it very convenient, but it can also slow the game down a lot as you take the time to consider all the different moves you could make. If you’re just playing a friendly game or practicing or have no reason to play under any time pressure, that’s fine.
One common element of in-person competitive events is that all the games have to finish within the allotted time, and chess clocks are often used to ensure that each player gets an equal share of the available time. I’ve got an online competitive event coming up soon, and I really want to replicate as much of the in-person tournament experience as possible, including the time pressure of playing on a clock. So I started looking around at the available online tools to see if I could find something that would work.
I found a lot of online chess clocks, but none that were both stand-alone and allowed more than one person to see and control the same clock. Since I couldn’t find anything that I liked, and I figured that if I was interested in having an online clock to help with running online events then other TOs would be interested too, I decide to write one.
Announcing the Dash28 Online Chess Clock. Feel free to use it for your online games and events. If you’d like some info on how it works, just check out the tutorial video below. It doesn’t look great on small screens, such as mobile phones, but other than that it should be ready for prime time. If you have any issues, questions, or suggestions, please let us know.
UPDATE: It should be usable on small screens/mobile devices now.
