Important Note

This project is not being maintained actively at the moment. I had started this project back when I was still new to Python and pygame. While I enjoyed and learnt a lot when I worked on this project, looking back at the codebase now after over 2 years, I can't help but notice how bad the codebase is. Please do not use this project as a base for any of your projects or for learning python and/or pygame. There are many resources out there that are much better than this project.

If I ever return to this project, it would mean doing full re-write of the entire codebase, with the current codebase being archived in a 'legacy' branch.

My-PyChess

This is a fully featured chess app written purely in Python using the pygame library.

Click here to see more few screenshots of My-PyChess in action!

Any bug-reports, suggestions or questions, you can leave it in the github issues section.

The My-PyChess project is available under MIT License. The MIT Licence applies to all the resources I have created in this project. This includes all the python files and text files. But some resources(images, sounds and font file) are not created by me, I have downloaded these from the internet. I have given credits to the authors of these resources in this file. All these resources maintain the original licenses that the authors have leased them under (These licenses permit my use of the respective resources in this project).

Getting started

• Make sure you have Python and pygame installed and working.
• Clone this repository (or download zip file and extract it).
• Then, run the pychess.py file. Trying to run any other file will not run the game.

There is also a lite implementation of My-PyChess, that focuses just on chess programming - free from all the code for menus, singleplayer, online etc.

Features

• Clean GUI with a lot of menus for ease of use.
• Allows users to make only valid move, does not allow users to make moves that puts the users king at check.
• Detects check, checkmate, stalemate and informs user.
• Supports things like castling, pawn promotion, enpassent etc.
• Supports saving and loading games.
• Has single player mode with two different types, levels and ability to play against the stockfish chess engine.
• Has online gamemode, play chess with anyone in the world.
• Has a chess game timer.
• Has a preference menu where you can customize the app to meet your preferences.
• Has a chess howto, about menu and stockfish install/configure menu to make things easy for users.

What's new in this Version 3.2

• Added a Back-Button, to go back to the previous menu. In older versions, the quit button was used for this purpose, but from now on a dedicated button to go back is there in the top-right corner. The quit button will now be used only to exit the app.
• Added a game timer to multiplayer mode, with a new menu to setup the timer.
• Fixed bugs and made many additions and improvements to the client-server in chess online gamemode.
• Made optimisations to core chess module and gui module.
• Added a chess hotwto.
• Minor improvements to game sounds and textbox.
• Upgraded preference menu and made the loadgame interface more robust.
• Several other minor changes and improvements made.

Highlights of v3.x, the latest major release.

• The code was revamped and restructured, fixed bugs and made major performance improvements.
• Online play was added. This features a online lobby and support upto 10 people to play chess.
• Singleplayer saw big upgrades: Firstly, a decent python chess engine that playes chess was added.
• You can play against stockfish chess engine (see https://stockfishchess.org). My-PyChess will act as an interface to give you this singleplayer mode.
• En-Passant in chess, undo move, screenflip and sounds were added.
• Lots of changes made to GUI.

Click here to see full changelog.

Online Gameplay

You can self-host the My-PyChess online server. Read more about it here.