xarchon (fantasy-themed board game) Archon: The Light and the Dark is a 1983 video game developed by Free Fall Associates and one of the first five games published by Electronic Arts. It's similar in concept to Chess, except that landing on another player's piece results in an arcade-style fight to determine the victor. xarchon is a rewrite of Archon and Archon II: Adept for modern systems. Single-player against the computer is supported, as well as multiplayer on the same computer or over the network. xarchon uses esd (the Enlightened Sound Daemon) for audio. esd must be running for the game to make sound (e.g. started by ~/.xinitrc, or by your desktop environment, or manually by typing "esd &" in a terminal).