Anichess takes Pengu Blast to Twitch with two-hour streamer arena Sunday

In Brief:

• Anichess (official site) is running a two-hour arena exclusive to Twitch streamers Anna-Maja Kazarian, Lile Koridze, ToshQueen and Afrchess on Sunday at 17:00 UTC.
• The event is built around Pengu Blast, the bomb spell that plants up to three explosives between the third and sixth ranks and clears every piece in the blast zone after three turns.
• Pengu Blast came out of the Pudgy Penguins takeover of Anichess, the game’s first major event on Abstract.

Anichess will run a two-hour arena exclusive to four chess streamers on Twitch on Sunday at 17:00 UTC, the game said in a post on X.

The field is Anna-Maja Kazarian, Lile Koridze, ToshQueen and Afrchess. “Chess with bombs is hitting Twitch,” Anichess said.

What Pengu Blast does

The spell at the center of the event landed in version 12.2.0. Pengu Blast lets a player deploy up to three bombs in any orientation between the third and sixth ranks. They detonate after three turns and eliminate everything in the blast zone.

It costs five mana and comes with three casts. Players gain one mana per turn when they don’t cast, up to eight, so a full Pengu Blast is roughly five quiet moves of setup.

Anichess unlocked the spell for all players immediately on release, alongside Transcendence and Pounce & Purr. That update, dated Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025, also opened ranked mode to everyone and added Pudgy Puff cosmetics at 1300 rating.

The lineup

Kazarian is a Dutch FIDE Master and Woman International Master who won the 2020 Dutch Women’s Internet Chess Championship and the European under-16 girls title. Her peak FIDE rating of 2334 came in 2026. She streams as annamaja.

Koridze is a Woman FIDE Master from Tbilisi with three WIM norms, a Twitch partner and a Chess.com partnered streamer. She started streaming Aug. 28, 2019, and is one of the few players to have beaten Hikaru Nakamura on stream.

ToshQueen is a Woman Candidate Master, Polish-born and based in Ireland, and won the 2023 Irish women’s championship. Afrchess runs a Twitch channel built around teaching tactics and appears in the Chess.com TV rotation.

None of the four is a crypto-native streamer. All four bring chess audiences that mostly haven’t seen a bomb go off on a board.

Where the spell came from

Pudgy Penguins took over Anichess starting Oct. 9, the game’s first major event after moving to Abstract. Anichess called it a rebrand rather than a collaboration, with Pudgy skins, a Pudgy loading screen and a new spell.

The takeover also added PenguBoard, a mode that has nothing to do with chess skill. Each board is an 8×8 grid frozen in ice, and players crush squares to find hidden $PENGU, with up to 600,000 $PENGU on offer. Squares open left to right, row by row. Crushing one costs 100 M8, the ecosystem’s onchain points, and clearing a full row costs 1373 M8.

M8 is earned by playing or by swapping $PENGU. Two leaderboards tracked the takeover, one ranked and one for M8 spent, and 0.25% of $CHECK goes to top PenguBoard players when it ends.

A Pudgy x Anichess tournament ran alongside it from Oct. 9 with a $10,000 $CHECK prize pool and a Lil Pudgy NFT for the winner. Entry required an Abstract Global Wallet account. It ran in three stages: ranked leaderboard qualifying, finalist selection, then single elimination with 36-hour match windows.

Background

Anichess is an Animoca Brands subsidiary and an official Chess.com partner, developed with five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen. It closed an oversubscribed US$1.5 million seed round and adopted CHECK as its native token.

The game’s phased launch began in January 2024 with solo spell puzzles. Public alpha followed in October 2024 with a Yield Guild Games distribution deal for Southeast Asia. Carlsen played a public exhibition match on March 13, 2025.

Anichess sponsored the Chess.com Open 2026, the $230,000 Champions Chess Tour event held April 23 to 26 with 16 players, alongside Esports World Cup, Neuro, Secretlab, Zenni and ChessUp.

The rules diverge from standard chess in ways that matter for a bomb spell. There’s no check or checkmate under Kingslay, you win by capturing the king outright, and moving into check is legal. Draws only happen on threefold repetition or the 50-move rule.

“Their chat is about to learn what a Pengu Blast is,” Anichess said.