Retro Games · thinking games in the palm of your hand

Retro Games

Remember the hand-held computer games of the 1980s — the little chess, backgammon and checkers machines that sat on the kitchen table and actually thought? Retro Games brings them back, the way they should have been: a real game-playing brain, squeezed onto a cheap microcontroller with a full-colour touch screen.

Everything runs on the board itself — no PC, no phone, no Wi-Fi, no cloud. And the hardware is tiny by today's standards, which is half the fun: getting a strong opponent into a few hundred kilobytes is the same craft those 1980s programmers practised.

The 4-inch ESP32 touch-screen board playing Retro Backgammon, with a ruler in front showing it is about 11 cm wide
One board, one game: Retro Backgammon on a 4-inch ESP32 touch screen, about 11 cm across.

The games

Available nowRetro Backgammon on the 4-inch touch screen, in the opening of a real game

Retro Backgammon →

A neural-network opponent from Backgammon-NN, with the doubling cube, hints and undo. Free on GitHub.
Available nowChess System Tal Retro on the 7-inch touch screen, in a Ruy Lopez, with its move list and evaluations

Chess System Tal Retro →

A chess computer with a neural-network engine, clocks and take back, on a 7-inch or 2-inch ESP32-S3 touch screen. Free on GitHub.

Retro Checkers

Draughts against a thinking opponent, on the same cheap touch-screen boards.