Chess With Bombs Hits Twitch: Anichess Books Four Streamers for Sunday Pengu Blast Arena

In Brief:

• Anichess (official site) has a two-hour arena reserved for Twitch streamers Anna-Maja Kazarian, Lile Koridze, ToshQueen and Afrchess, going live Sunday at 17:00 UTC.
• Pengu Blast anchors the event — the bomb spell drops as many as three explosives across the third through sixth ranks, wiping out every piece caught in the blast zone once three turns pass.
• The spell traces back to the Pudgy Penguins takeover of Anichess, which was the title’s first major event on Abstract.

According to a post on X from the game, Anichess is staging a two-hour arena on Twitch this Sunday at 17:00 UTC, open only to four chess streamers.

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

What Pengu Blast does

Version 12.2.0 introduced the spell the event revolves around. With Pengu Blast, a player can place as many as three bombs in whatever orientation they like across the third to sixth ranks. Three turns later the bombs go off, wiping out everything inside the blast zone.

The cost is five mana, and the spell ships with three casts. A turn without a cast earns a player one mana, capped at eight, which makes a complete Pengu Blast about five quiet moves’ worth of preparation.

On release day, the spell was unlocked for every player right away, arriving next to Transcendence and Pounce & Purr. Dated Tuesday, Oct. 14, 2025, that same update threw ranked mode open to all players and introduced Pudgy Puff cosmetics at 1300 rating.

The lineup

A Dutch FIDE Master and Woman International Master, Kazarian took the 2020 Dutch Women’s Internet Chess Championship as well as the European under-16 girls title. She hit a peak FIDE rating of 2334 in 2026 and streams under the handle annamaja.

Koridze, a Woman FIDE Master out of Tbilisi, holds three WIM norms and is both a Twitch partner and a Chess.com partnered streamer. Her streaming career began Aug. 28, 2019, and she ranks among the handful of players who have beaten Hikaru Nakamura live on stream.

Born in Poland and now living in Ireland, ToshQueen is a Woman Candidate Master and the 2023 Irish women’s champion. Afrchess, meanwhile, has built a Twitch channel around tactics instruction and features in the Chess.com TV rotation.

Not one of the four comes from a crypto-native background. What they do bring are chess audiences that have largely never watched a bomb detonate on a board.

Where the spell came from

Beginning Oct. 9, Pudgy Penguins took over Anichess in what was the game’s first major event following its move to Abstract. Anichess described it as a rebrand instead of a collaboration, complete with Pudgy skins, a Pudgy loading screen and a fresh spell.

PenguBoard also arrived with the takeover, a mode entirely divorced from chess skill. Boards are 8×8 grids locked in ice, and players smash squares hunting hidden $PENGU, with as much as 600,000 $PENGU up for grabs. Squares unlock row by row, moving left to right. Each crush runs 100 M8 — the ecosystem’s onchain points — while wiping out an entire row runs 1373 M8.

Players pick up M8 either by playing or by swapping $PENGU. The takeover was tracked across two leaderboards, one ranked and the other based on M8 spent, and when it wraps, 0.25% of $CHECK is headed to the leading PenguBoard players.

Running in parallel from Oct. 9 was a Pudgy x Anichess tournament carrying a $10,000 $CHECK prize pool plus a Lil Pudgy NFT for the champion. Players needed an Abstract Global Wallet account to enter. The format spanned three stages: ranked leaderboard qualifying, then finalist selection, then single elimination with 36-hour match windows.

Background

A subsidiary of Animoca Brands and an official Chess.com partner, Anichess was developed alongside five-time world champion Magnus Carlsen. The studio closed an oversubscribed US$1.5 million seed round and took on CHECK as its native token.

January 2024 marked the start of the game’s phased launch, opening with solo spell puzzles. October 2024 brought public alpha along with a Yield Guild Games distribution deal covering Southeast Asia. Carlsen then played a public exhibition match on March 13, 2025.

The company was a sponsor of the Chess.com Open 2026 — the $230,000 Champions Chess Tour event staged April 23 to 26 with a 16-player field — sharing the billing with Esports World Cup, Neuro, Secretlab, Zenni and ChessUp.

Anichess departs from standard chess in ways that matter a great deal for a bomb spell. Kingslay has no check or checkmate; victory comes from capturing the king outright, and it’s perfectly legal to move into check. The only routes to a draw are threefold repetition and the 50-move rule.

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