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About Pixie Chess
Pixie Chess is a Web3 chess game running on the Base network. Players collect and trade NFT pieces with special abilities, such as the Bouncer Bishop that can bounce off board edges and the Golden Pawn that auto-wins on promotion. The game offers Quickplay, Brawl, and tournament modes. New pieces are released through daily auctions, with proceeds flowing into the prize vault. Players must burn pieces to enter tournaments.
The core appeal is combining traditional chess with NFT collect-and-burn mechanics, forming a "collect, burn, earn" loop. The custom piece abilities make standard chess engines unable to analyze positions, reducing AI-cheating risks and encouraging new strategies.
The game addresses common issues in online chess: AI cheating and lack of true asset ownership. By introducing non-standard piece rules, it prevents engine assistance, while NFTs provide on-chain ownership. The burn mechanism also controls supply and supports economic sustainability.
In the past six months (March to September 2026), the game enabled mobile browser support, allowing players to join tournaments and manage pieces directly from mobile browsers, lowering the entry barrier. Daily auctions and events have continued, though the player base remains at an early stage.
Pixie Chess, a Web3 chess game, was founded by Josh Harris during his time as an entrepreneur-in-residence at Paradigm, drawing inspiration from NounsDAO's daily auction model. The project raised a $5.2 million seed round led by Paradigm roughly two years before its public launch, with participation from Seed Club Ventures and notable angels including Deployer.eth, Chevan Tin, and Trevor McFedries. During its beta phase (January 23 to February 6, 2026), the game demonstrated strong organic demand: in one beta game, 300 players voluntarily contributed $25,000 of their own money to a prize pool, five times the expected amount. On April 2, 2026, Pixie Chess officially launched on Base, with a treasury pre-funded at 82.95 ETH (34.39 ETH from piece sales and 48.56 ETH injected by the team). The core long-term mechanism is its tournament system, where players must burn pieces to enter, permanently removing them from circulation. This creates a deflationary supply dynamic and a shifting metagame, while all revenue from daily piece auctions and packs flows directly into tournament prize pools, establishing a self-sustaining player-funded economy.
Based on the provided references, the co-founders and core executives of Pixie Chess are:
Joshua Harris: Founder. He previously worked at Paradigm as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) and at Party Round as part of the founding team. He studied economics & history at Western University.
Willem Simons: Co-Founder. He is also the founder of Daze, co-founder of Muze, and an advisor at Wand. He studied at Anglo-American University in Prague and later at the University of Delaware (economics and philosophy).