About Ply Yard

Ply Yard is an independent studio crafting browser-based board games. A ply is a single turn taken by one player in chess and abstract strategy games. A yard is a workshop. The name reflects our purpose: sit down at a dedicated board, play a move, and enjoy the game without friction.

1. Why Ply Yard Exists

Most online board games today are buried beneath heavy app-store downloads, mandatory account registrations, invasive tracking, and cluttered multi-game portals. Finding a simple, clean board to practice an opening or play a quick casual match with a nearby friend often takes minutes of navigation through popups and ad walls.

Ply Yard was built to do the opposite. Each game in our workshop is hosted on its own focused subdomain so that search engines and direct links land immediately on an active, playable board. The studio homepage at plyyard.com serves as the workshop catalog, while actual play happens directly on the game hosts.

2. Technical Architecture & Craft

We treat browser games as precision workshop tools. Our technical choices prioritize instant load times, zero latency during move calculations, and strict client-side isolation:

• Pure SVG Vector Boards: Instead of heavyweight canvas game frameworks or cumbersome 90-button HTML DOM layouts, our boards are rendered with clean, crisp SVG vectors. Lines, rivers, star points, and pieces scale smoothly to any viewport resolution without pixelation or blur on high-DPI Retina screens.
• Isolated Web Worker Compute: Artificial intelligence searches and move evaluations run entirely inside dedicated browser Web Workers off the main UI thread. Even at maximum search depths, the board interface remains completely fluid and responsive to clicks and touch gestures.
• Ephemeral Real-Time Multiplayer: Live peer-to-peer rooms connect players instantly via WebSockets backed by lightweight Cloudflare Workers Durable Objects. Rooms exist strictly in volatile memory during active matches and leave zero permanent move logs or database baggage behind.

3. The Current Catalog

• Xiangqi (xiangqi.plyyard.com) — A full board in your browser—no app, account, or setup.

This batch opens one table. More boards will join later; they will each get their own host instead of sharing a lobby.

Xiangqi (Chinese Chess)

A full-featured 9×10 board implementing canonical Chinese chess rules: river boundaries for elephants, 3×3 palace constraints for generals and advisors, cannon screen jumps, horse leg blocking, flying generals, and automatic 3-fold repetition with perpetual check loss adjudication. Includes four calibrated AI difficulty levels (Easy, Medium, Hard, Master), shared single-screen two-player mode, and instant room invites for remote play.

4. Open Artwork & Engine Credits

We believe in transparent attribution and supporting open-source software and creative commons heritage:

• Piece Artwork (Xiangqi): The red and black circular piece designs (the hnz SVG set) originate from the open-source pychess-variants project by gbtami and contributors, used unmodified under the GNU AGPL-3.0 License. Asset copies and license documentation reside on the Xiangqi host at xiangqi.plyyard.com/xiangqi-pieces/.
• AI Engine (Xiangqi): Versus-AI move generation incorporates the battle-tested XQWLight (XiangQi Wizard Light) engine by Morning Yellow / xqbase, utilized unmodified under the GNU GPL-2.0 License. A full text copy of the license is available at xiangqi.plyyard.com/xq/xqwlight-LICENSE.txt. Legal movement verification, perpetual check rules, and game state management remain that host’s independent implementation.

5. Contact & Feedback

Have a rule question, discovered an edge-case engine bug, or have a suggestion for the next board in the yard? Reach out directly to the creators at contact@plyyard.com or read our contact guide for bug reporting details.