Anichess Season 5: Winter Clash

Winter Clash lands during the festive season, when the board looks a little colder and games tend to matter a bit more.Season Five introduces a shorter competitive cycle in Anichess and refocuses$CHECKrewards into a single competitive path.

Winter Clash holds a total of 1,000,000 CHECK, all distributed through Checkmate Arena, alongside an Anichess Ethernal raffle.

What’s in Season Five

Winter Clash includes three core components: Checkmate Arena, Ranked Mode, and a set of Christmas-themed cosmetics.Checkmate Arena is a buy-in competitive mode using M8. Ranked resets for the season and continues to track Rating-based performance. Cosmetics can be unlocked by playing ranked matches.

Checkmate Arena

Checkmate Arena is a competitive queue that requires an M8 buy-in to enter.Buy-ins are fixed at 5,000 M8. Once entered, you play standard Anichess matches against other Arena participants. Every completed match adds points to your Checkmate Arena score.Wins adds 300 points, a Defeat or a Draw adds 100 points.

At the end of the season, 1,000,000 CHECK is distributed to top players on the Checkmate Arena leaderboard. Rewards scale with leaderboard rank.

Top 100 Checkmate Arena players will also enter a raffle to win an Anichess Ethernal.Each Arena entry is treated as its own run. There is no carryover between entries. Playing in Checkmate Arena also ties your activity into Abstract-native progression.

Ranked Mode

Ranked Mode runs in parallel with Checkmate Arena for Winter Clash.The Ranked leaderboard resets at the start of the season. Matches affect Rating as usual, and placement is determined by performance across the season.Ranked does not distribute$CHECKduring Winter Clash.Instead, it serves as the primary path for rating progression, seasonal cosmetics, and qualification for quarterly Playoffs.Performance in Ranked across consecutive seasons determines eligibility for higher-stakes Playoff events with dedicated prize pools.

Christmas Cosmetics

Season Five includes a set of Christmas-themed cosmetics.These are earned by completing Ranked matches during the season.Complete 10 Ranked matches to unlock the Christmas Background.Complete 25 Ranked matches to unlock the Christmas Chessboard.Complete 50 Ranked matches to unlock the Christmas Chesspiece.All cosmetics are visual only and do not affect gameplay.

Shorter Seasons and Quarterly Playoffs

Starting with Season Five, Anichess seasons will run on a shorter cadence.Not every season will end in playoffs. Instead, playoffs will take place once per quarter.Eligibility is based on performance across three consecutive seasons. Ranked performance is the only metric used for Playoff qualification. The top players across those seasons qualify for the playoff phase.Winter Clash is the first season to run under this structure.

Getting Started

You can participate in Winter Clash through Ranked Mode, Checkmate Arena, or both.Ranked is required to earn seasonal cosmetics and contributes to Playoff. Checkmate Arena requires an M8 buy-in and runs as a separate competitive path where every match counts.Winter Clash is live. Play it through.