Zulu Chess
XGameDev has been co-developing Zulu Chess with CCI NY, Blac Foundation and Pubbly since 2012.
- Client
- CCI NY, Blac Foundation, Pubbly
- Duration
- Since 2012
- Engine
- Unity
- Platforms
- Google Play, iOS, WebGL
The Brief
Zulu Chess is a multiplayer digital board game based on Umlabalaba, the popular African game that resembles Twelve Men's Morris or Mills. Curriculum Concepts International New York, the Blac Foundation, and Pubbly wanted to bring that game to a digital, multiplayer audience, and unlike most of the projects on this page, it's been a long-running relationship rather than a single delivery: we've been co-developing it with them since 2012.
Our Approach
Zulu Chess has changed shape several times across 10+ years of co-development. It started as a 3D game built in Unity, then evolved into a 2D game with improved gameplay mechanics and features, while keeping its core concept intact: matching tokens and capturing an opponent's pieces on the board. We built it for Google Play, WebGL, and iOS, with in-app purchases and e-commerce features for players who want to buy in-game items. A project that's stayed in active development for over a decade needs an architecture that can absorb a full dimensional shift, 3D to 2D, without a ground-up rewrite each time, which shaped a lot of the ongoing technical decisions.
The Outcome
Zulu Chess has given Curriculum Concepts International New York, the Blac Foundation, and Pubbly a long-running, evolving digital version of Umlabalaba across Google Play, WebGL, and iOS, still being actively developed 10+ years after the first build.
Related Services
Long-running products like this are close to our Unity game co-development and Unity mobile game development work.