Manual

Your first hour

You start with one Uncommon bot, 2,500 credits and 40 tokens. Before playing a single ranked match, go to Training and spend two sessions on Calculation: it carries the most weight of any attribute, and the early gains are cheap.

Then play a ranked match from HQ and watch it at 1×. You are not watching for entertainment — you are learning what your bot does badly, which tells you what to train next.

Daily objectives pay more than the matches themselves in the first days. Clear all five for the completion bonus.

The eight attributes, and what each one really changes

Calculation — the node budget and search depth. Roughly, every point buys about 7.5% more nodes. This is the single biggest driver of playing strength.

Tactics — the quiescence horizon. Below 15 quiescence is off, and the bot hangs pieces constantly. At 35 it sees two plies of captures, at 60 it sees six, above that it searches captures to exhaustion. No other attribute changes the feel of a bot this much.

Positional Sense — below 22 the bot evaluates material and piece-squares only. Above it, mobility, king safety, pawn structure, rooks on open files and the bishop pair all switch on and scale up.

Opening Theory — how many plies of the built-in book it follows and how faithfully. A low-theory bot leaves book after four moves and improvises; a high-theory bot reaches known middlegames.

Endgame — below 35 the bot has no mop-up heuristic and will genuinely fail to mate with rook and king. Above 50 it recognises drawn opposite-bishop endings. In the endgame it also gets extra search depth.

Composure — the blunder probability, and how much strength survives pressure. A low-Composure bot throws away winning positions; a high-Composure bot grinds.

Stamina — maximum energy and how well the bot holds its level.

Aggression — pure style, not strength. It shifts contempt, king-attack weight and sacrifice tolerance. Two bots at the same rating with different Aggression are completely different to watch.

Potential and the training ceiling

Every attribute has a hidden ceiling, set when the bot is created and never changeable. Training cannot cross it. A Common bot with 80 potential in Calculation is worth more than a Rare bot with 60.

You see potential only after scouting. Your own starter bot is already scouted; bots on the market are not, which is exactly why scouting a listing before buying is worth 30 tokens.

Training gets progressively more expensive: raising an attribute from 20 to 21 is cheap, from 80 to 81 is not. Above 70 each session also yields less. Plan for breadth before depth.

Watching a match, and interfering with it

Instruction points are spent during a live match and change the engine for the next several plies. They are not flavour text: Calculate Deeply multiplies the node budget by 2.5 and cuts the blunder rate to a third; Go For The Attack raises the king-attack weight by 40% and makes the engine tolerate 60 centipawns of material loss for an attack.

When the evaluation swings sharply the game pauses on a critical moment. That is the point where an instruction is worth the most — you are reacting to a position the engine has just misjudged or just won.

The pause is skipped when you are playing at instant speed or have no points left, because there would be nothing to decide.

Energy, condition and form

Energy regenerates at 30 per hour whether or not you are online. Below 60 energy your bot loses effective strength, down to 70% of its ability at zero. Playing a tired bot is how ratings get thrown away.

Form moves between −3 and +3 and shifts Composure and Tactics. Morale drifts down if a bot sits unused, and a Bot Lounge reverses that.

The market

Twelve listings, refreshed every three hours. The valuation formula rewards potential far above current strength, so an untrained bot with high potential is expensive and a maxed-out bot with low potential is cheap.

Selling instantly gives 82% of value with no fee. Listing at your own price gives more but takes time, and there is a fee on sale which the Workshop reduces.

A round trip always loses money. The market is for finding potential you do not have, not for arbitrage.

Taking a bot out of the game

Any bot exports as a genome: a readable JSON file with its effective attributes and engine profile. The included UCI adapter turns that file into a real chess engine.

Register it in Arena, Cute Chess, Banksia, En Croissant or Nibbler with command node and arguments <game folder>/uci/cbm-uci.mjs "<path>/MYBOT.botx".

It plays exactly as it does here, blunder rate included, so your bot can enter a genuine engine tournament. Genomes are signed: re-importing your own brings the bot home free, while a genome from someone else arrives as a rival you can study and must pay to recruit.