www.pychess.org

pychess-variants is a free, open-source chess server designed to play chess variants.

Currently supported games are:

• Makruk
• Makpong
• Ouk Chatrang
• Sittuyin
• ASEAN Chess
• Shogi
• Minishogi
• Kyoto shogi
• Dobutsu shogi
• Goro-Goro shogi
• Tori Shogi
• Cannon Shogi
• Xiangqi
• Manchu
• Janggi
• Minixiangqi
• Placement chess
• Crazyhouse
• Atomic
• Three check
• King of the Hill
• Duck chess
• Alice chess
• Fog of War
• Dragon chess
• S-chess
• Capablanca
• Gothic
• Grand
• Shako
• Shogun
• Mansindam
• Orda
• Khan's chess
• Synochess
• Hoppel-Poppel
• Shinobi+
• Empire Chess
• Orda Mirror
• Chak
• Chennis
• Spartan chess
• S-house (S-chess+Crazyhouse)
• Capahouse (Capablanca+Crazyhouse)
• Grandhouse (Grand chess+Crazyhouse)
• Chess
• Ataxx

Additionally you can check Chess960 option in for Chess, Crazyhouse, Atomic, Three check, King of the Hill, S-chess, Capablanca and Capahouse to start games from random positions with Chess960 castling rules

For move generation, validation, analysis and engine play it uses

• Fairy-Stockfish
• fairy-stockfish.wasm
• fairyfishnet fork of fishnet

On client side it is based on chessgroundx fork of chessground

As you know, pychess-variants is a free server and it will remain free forever. However, maintaining and improving the server costs time and money.

If you like our work and find our server useful, please donate through patreon or directly through paypal!! Your contribution will be greatly appreciated and help me continue to develop this awesome server.

Installation

Prerequisites

• You need mongodb up and running. Mongo daemon

Project setup

pip3 install -r requirements.txt --user // Install python requirements
yarn install                            // Install node requirements
yarn dev                                // Compile typescript files to javascript
yarn md                                 // Compile md files to html

Start server

python3 server/server.py

Docker setup

If you want to avoid installing dependencies (mongo, node, python) you can instead run the server locally in docker using compose. To start it, simply run:

docker compose up --build

This recompiles the frontend and starts the server and DB. Once it is up, you can connect to localhost:8080 in your browser.

Supported browsers

Pychess-variants should support almost all browsers. Though older browsers (including any version of Internet Explorer) will not work. For your own sake, please upgrade. Security and performance, think about it!

Only Fairy-Stockfish analysis might not work on all browsers.