Web3 Gaming is Dead? I Built a Chess Game That Can't Die!

Is Web3 gaming really dead? A post from Lily Liu on 20th March 2026 kicked off a big debate on Twitter about exactly that, and it got me thinking about Gamerplex, a project I started 3 or 4 years ago and put on the shelf. So in this video I'm submitting a fully on-chain chess game, Magic Chess, to the Solana Blitz v3 hackathon with 7 hours left on the clock!

What is Blitz v3?

Blitz is a weekend hackathon run by MagicBlock, the ephemeral rollup provider for Solana. They run one every weekend, and this was the third weekend in a row. The prizes are all in US dollars:

Place	Prize
1st	$500
2nd	$250
3rd	$150
Wizard's Choice	$100

The one rule is to use their ephemeral rollup tech, which is all open source. Details are at hackathon.magicblock.app.

What is Magic Chess?

Magic Chess is chess where every single move is recorded on Solana inside an ephemeral rollup. Every score goes on chain too, using MagicBlock's SOAR framework for the leaderboard, and you can go back and replay any game.

Why bother putting chess on chain? If you play on chess.com, your games and rating live in their centralised database. I wanted it fully decentralised, so when you connect your wallet or your SNS ID, your game history and reputation follow you around forever. Even if Gamerplex stopped existing tomorrow, it's all still on chain. No middleman.

The goal is 100% decentralisation:

• The rules engine and smart contracts are on chain
• The game state is on chain
• Move validation (the resolver) is on chain
• The SOAR leaderboard and scores are on chain

It's live on Devnet. You can flick between 2D and 3D mode at any time (the state is on chain, so it never forgets where you were), there's a two minute move timer to keep things quick, and I've gone with a wizard theme. Any artists who want to add more wizardry, let me know!

How do you get normal people playing?

One of the biggest problems in Web3 is getting people to connect a wallet at all. So Gamerplex funds a free pool of ephemeral rollups. New players just jump in and play for free, with every move still recorded on chain, and only connect a wallet at the end if they want their score on the leaderboard.

A few more things I built for the hackathon:

• Five AI agents powered by Stockfish (the leading chess engine, imported as a JS library), each set to a different Elo level, playing each other nonstop
• A live viewer showing all the concurrent games on chain in real time
• A small Solana indexer covering MagicBlock ephemeral rollups and Flipcash's Code VMs, feeding the activity page
• Challenges, where you put $1 in, your friend matches it and you play for the $2 pot
• Tipping, plus a streamer mode, so anyone can tip a player after a good game as a demo of microtransactions

In my live game the "intermediate" bot gave up its queen pretty quickly, so the chess AI needs work. Then I talked too much, the move timer hit zero and I lost anyway 😭 My chess isn't being judged here, my building is!

Why am I building all this?

Gamerplex is meant to be a portal where anyone can build games fast with AI agents. I'm building the AI skills so anyone with Claude Code, or their friendly AI assistant, can spin up their own decentralised game quickly. The docs on gamerplex.com go into the reasoning, example smart contracts and the overall architecture.

There's a second reason. I needed an example startup for my community. I'm automating the whole thing with Paperclip and OpenClaw, with AI agents doing the marketing, Discord management, email outbound and maybe even partnerships. I'm fighting against the idea that AI agents will take everyone's job and make everyone poor. I want to show the positive side, where we let the agents do the work and live off what they build.

What's next?

If you liked it, please vote for me in Blitz v3 (there's a link at the top of every Gamerplex page to their Telegram). The big one is the Colosseum Frontier Hackathon, which kicks off the day after I recorded this, and I'll keep building Gamerplex in the open.

Have fun building and playing! Come follow along with the agents at liberati.life, and I'll see you on the chess leaderboards. Cheers!