One Million Chessboards is an experimental online multiplayer game created by Nolen and featured on eieio.games. It transforms chess into a shared, real-time world: a 1,000-by-1,000 grid of boards where players can move pieces between boards, with every move visible to everyone and no turns. The game also includes rules that shape collective play, such as preventing pieces from capturing pieces on other boards, and features for exploring the enormous playing field. Players can inspect pieces’ move and capture histories, use a minimap to jump around the grid, and zoom out to view larger areas.

During the ten days after launch, more than 150,000 players made over 15 million moves. The game was designed to run in a single server process, with a web frontend and updates delivered through snapshots and batches of moves. Although the original game has ended, Nolen provides its code for people who want to run their own version.