Pastimes is a Minecraft board game mod that adds fully playable Chess and Russian Draughts (Checkers) directly into the world.

Play chess or draughts against other players, challenge Minecraft villagers as AI opponents, place physical game boards in your builds, discover game areas naturally generated in villages, and compete for profession-based villager rewards.

Chess follows the standard rules, including check, checkmate, castling, en passant, pawn promotion, stalemate, and draws by agreement. Russian Draughts features mandatory captures, flying kings, promotion during capture sequences, and multi-captures.

Backgammon and Go are planned for future updates.

Pastimes was originally created for ModJam 2026 around the theme “Echoes of the Past”, inspired by traditional board games that have survived for centuries and are still played today.

People played chess and draughts hundreds of years ago, and we still sit down and play them now. The rules changed here and there, the boards changed, the people obviously changed, but the games stayed.

Pastimes brings those games into Minecraft as actual parts of the world rather than detached minigames.

Games

Pastimes currently includes Chess and Russian Draughts / Checkers. Both games support player versus player matches and games against villagers.

The boards are physical blocks that can be placed anywhere in the world. Plains villages can also generate dedicated game areas around their central meeting points, making chess and draughts part of ordinary village life.

Chess

Play full chess directly inside Minecraft.

The game follows the standard rules, including:

• Check and checkmate
• Castling
• En passant
• Pawn promotion
• Stalemate
• Draws by agreement

Games can be played against another player or against villagers with different hidden skill levels.

Russian Draughts / Checkers

Pastimes uses Russian Draughts rules rather than standard American Checkers.

Captures are mandatory, kings can move freely across open diagonals, and a piece that reaches the back row during a capture sequence is crowned immediately and continues the sequence as a king.

Russian Draughts can also be played against another player or against villagers.

Backgammon and Go are planned additions.

Playing against villagers

Minecraft villagers can be challenged to Chess or Russian Draughts and act as opponents with different hidden skill levels.

Villagers are not all equally strong. Each villager receives a hidden skill level, and the only real way to learn how good someone is is to play against them.

A villager's profession influences that skill. Librarians tend to be stronger players, while unemployed villagers are usually weaker. Their actual skill level is never shown directly and does not change later if their profession changes.

This means two villagers of the same profession can still play very differently.

Villager rewards

Villagers may put up a prize before a match begins.

Beat them, and you get it.

The type of reward depends on the villager's profession, while its quality depends on how strong the opponent is.

A librarian might offer an enchanted book, a toolsmith a pickaxe, or a weaponsmith a sword. Farmers and other villagers may offer food, emeralds, diamonds, or other useful items.

There is no penalty for losing. The prize is shown before the game begins, so you always know what is being played for.

Persistent games

Villagers are not always available for a match. They may be asleep, caught in a raid, already playing someone else, too far from home, or unwilling to play again immediately after a recent loss.

If nightfall, danger, or another interruption forces a game to stop, the match is adjourned rather than discarded.

You can continue the same game later.

Village integration

Pastimes is designed to make traditional board games feel like part of the Minecraft world.

Plains villages can sometimes generate dedicated places for villagers and players to play Chess or Draughts around the village meeting area.

You can also place your own boards anywhere, making them useful for houses, taverns, libraries, village builds, multiplayer servers, or anything else where a physical board game belongs.

Echoes of the Past

The idea behind Pastimes is simple: these games are old enough to belong to history, but they never really left it.

Chess, draughts, backgammon, Go, and other traditional board games have passed through generations, places, and centuries while remaining recognisable games that people still sit down and play today.

That felt like my favourite interpretation of “Echoes of the Past”: not something buried and forgotten, but something from the past whose echo can still clearly be heard now.