Chess
Play chess against a computer that really calculates — full rules, three difficulty levels, and a board that fits your phone.
About this game
Chess needs no introduction, and this is a fast, complete version you can start in a second — no download, no account, no waiting for an opponent. Every rule is here, including the ones most browser versions quietly skip: castling on both sides (and the refusal to castle out of, through, or into check), en passant, under-promotion to a rook, bishop or knight as well as a queen, stalemate, the fifty-move rule, draws by threefold repetition, and draws by insufficient material. The move generator is verified against the standard perft counts to depth four from six different positions, so the legal moves you are shown are exactly the legal moves of chess. The opponent is a real engine rather than a lookup table of openings. It searches with iterative deepening and alpha-beta pruning, keeps a transposition table so it never re-solves a position it has already understood, and extends its search through checks and captures so it does not walk into tactics one move past the horizon. It judges positions on material, piece placement, king safety, the bishop pair, and pawn structure — doubled, isolated and passed pawns all count. Because it thinks on a clock rather than to a fixed depth, it stays responsive on a phone and uses the extra headroom on a laptop. Three levels give you somewhere to grow. Easy looks a couple of moves ahead and will let a mistake go; Medium punishes loose pieces; Hard takes its time and calculates properly. Pick a piece up by tapping or dragging and every legal destination is marked — a dot for a quiet move, a ring for a capture — so you can see the position rather than guess at it. The move list records real algebraic notation, the captured pieces and material balance are always visible, and you can take a move back, flip the board, or start again at any point. The whole board is playable from the keyboard too.
Controls
Tap a piece then a highlighted square, or drag it. Castle by moving the king two squares toward the rook.
Keyboard
- Arrow keys move the cursor.
- Enter picks up and places, Escape cancels.
How to play
Each side starts with sixteen pieces and White moves first.
How the pieces move
Every piece moves differently:
- Rooks along ranks and files, bishops on diagonals, the queen both ways.
- Knights in an L that jumps over anything in the way, and the king one square at a time.
- Pawns forward one square (or two from their starting row) while capturing diagonally.
Winning and drawing
- The aim is checkmate — attacking the enemy king so that no legal move escapes the attack.
- If the side to move has no legal move but is not in check, the game is a draw by stalemate.
Details
- Category
- Board
- Platform
- Web browser
- Rules
- Full rules
- Price
- Free
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