silversummitco

Born on June 02, 2026•1 Karma

Balance of Power Chess is officially live.

After a long road of design, playtesting, and coding, the first public release of Balance of Power Chess is available right now — free to install from PyPI with one line:

    pip install bop-chess

Then just type:

bop

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WHAT IS IT?

Balance of Power Chess is a two-player chess-themed trick-taking card game played with a standard 52-card deck. Every card is a chess piece. The King rules — until the smallest card in the deck declares en passant and takes the throne.

"King is the father, Queen the mother, the two is the child — and the child grows into a King. So the cycle of power begins again."

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THE GAME

Two phases make up each match:

BATTLE ROUND Classic trick-taking with a twist. A Board Card drawn each round sets the suit. Two special plays change everything:

• En Passant — declare your 2 to beat a King • Castle — play your 10 and King together, supreme in its suit

PROCESSION ROUND The face cards, 10s, and 2s you captured in the Battle become your final hand. Play them in ascending order up the suit ladder. Any Queen entering the board wins the slot — the Stop Run rule.

First to 64 cumulative Procession points wins the Game. 64 — one point for every square on a chess board.

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WHAT'S IN THE CLI VERSION

• Full chess-table card layout with mini playing cards in your terminal • Two AI difficulty levels — Easy and Hard • Guided tutorial for new players • Star Wars style lore intro crawl • Trick history log • Works on Linux, macOS, and Windows • Requires Python 3.9 or newer

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WHAT'S NEXT

This CLI edition is the legacy foundation. Future versions with better UI and expanded features are already in development under SilverSummitCo LLC.

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LINKS

PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/bop-chess/ GitHub: https://github.com/silversummitco/balance-of-power-chess