What I Learned Building a Game Nobody Could Explain to Me
بقلم Eric Nielson
The first time I tried to explain Shadow Chess to someone, they stared at me for a long moment and said, "So... it's chess, but some pieces don't exist?"
Not quite.
shadow-chess.com is a chess variant I built and launched this year. The concept: every piece on the board moves like standard chess, but some of your pieces are shadows — decoys that bluff, intercept, and deceive, but cannot make real captures. Your opponent can't tell which of your pieces are real until they encounter one. The psychological warfare starts before the first move.
Explaining that takes about ninety seconds. Getting someone to want to play it — that's a different problem entirely.
The Game Has to Work Without Me in the Room
When you build something, you understand it completely. Every rule, every edge case, every reason the design decisions are the way they are. The problem is that your users don't have you in the room.
This is a problem I know from translation work. A text written in French by someone who knows exactly what they mean arrives in my hands, and my job is to make sure an English reader arrives at the same understanding — without me standing there to clarify, to add context, to say no, what they actually meant was. The text has to do that work entirely on its own.
shadow-chess.com taught me the same lesson through a different door. I can't be there when someone loads the game for the first time. The interface, the rules page, the way the pieces behave — all of it has to communicate the concept without me. And the concept is genuinely strange. Hidden pieces in chess runs against decades of muscle memory. The game has to earn the player's trust before it can ask them to rewire their instincts.
What Editorial Work Actually Is
The months I spent refining Shadow Chess — writing and rewriting the rules, iterating on how encounters are explained, testing which framing made players curious instead of confused — were, in a real sense, editorial work.
Not code. Not design. Editorial.
The core question at every stage was the same question I ask when I'm editing a translation: does this land the way it's supposed to? Not "is this technically accurate?" Not "does this cover all the cases?" Does it land?
There's a version of the rules that's completely correct and completely unreadable. There's a version that's simple and slightly misleading. The version worth shipping is the one that's accurate and makes the reader want to keep going. Finding that version requires exactly the same instincts as good editing: patience, willingness to kill your darlings, and a genuine interest in how a stranger will read what you wrote.
The Discipline of Designing for Absence
One specific thing Shadow Chess forced me to get right: the shadow reveal mechanic.
When a real piece captures a shadow, the attacker freezes for two turns. When a shadow tries to capture a real piece, the shadow is exposed and the real piece stays. When shadow meets shadow — a genuinely unusual outcome — a surprise deployment is triggered. Each of these outcomes needed to feel logical and fair in the moment, even to someone who hadn't read the rules carefully.
Getting there meant writing dozens of versions of the explanation. Every time a playtester was confused about why their piece froze, or why the opponent's piece survived, I had to figure out whether the rules were unclear, the interface was misleading, or I had simply failed to give the player the right mental model early enough.
This is the discipline of designing for absence. You cannot rely on goodwill, context, or the ability to explain yourself. The communication has to do the whole job.
What This Means for Clients
The clients I work with at Nielson English are in a similar position. A press release goes out, and I'm not in the room when a journalist reads it. An investor deck lands in an inbox, and I'm not there to explain what the company actually meant by that phrase that sounds strange in English. A website goes live, and the international visitors who bounce in ten seconds never send feedback.
Building shadow-chess.com gave me a sharper version of a lesson I already believed: the communication is either doing the job on its own, or it isn't.
There's no partial credit for good intentions.
If your English communications are relying on context you can't provide, I can help.
Eric Nielson is the founder of Nielson English, an editor and translator at TelQuel English, and the developer of shadow-chess.com.