So that's exactly what I'm putting together now - a polished OP plus the campaign to keep it active, rather than letting it stall on page two.
This is about getting the pieces in place, not waiting on Google; the public launch and the ANN will land together, with real weight behind them.
Moving to Base was definitely the right call for the gas mechanics.
One thing I'd keep an eye on before launching the bounty campaign is infrastructure. Bounties tend to bring a large spike in traffic, along with plenty of automated activity trying to game the system.
Since your chess mechanics mint tokens based on in-game actions, RPC performance could become a bottleneck during peak periods. Public endpoints often struggle once activity starts ramping up, so it's worth stress-testing everything ahead of launch.
We've seen similar issues with gaming and dApp projects before, which is why at Crouton Digital we usually recommend dedicated RPC capacity for launches expected to attract a large user wave.
Hopefully you've already accounted for that, but it's something many projects underestimate. Looking forward to seeing the ANN thread when it goes live.