Zakuchess

Chess with character(s)

A free and open-source "daily chess challenge" game, where you play against a computer opponent with pixel art units.

No analytics, no tracking, no ads - it was built purely for fun, and to check how far I could go with a reactive User Interface powered by htmx 🙂

The game lives at zakuchess.com.

The stack

• Programming language: Python
• Web framework: Django
• Database: SQLite
• Live user interface: htmx
• HTML templating: DOMinate
• CSS framework: Tailwind CSS
• TypeScript compilation: esbuild
• Units art: The Battle for Wesnoth 🛡️
• Chess logic on the server: python-chess
• Chess logic in the browser: Stockfish (compiled in WebAssembly by the wonderful folks at Lichess 💙)
• Talking of Lichess... Most of the daily challenges are adaptations of games from their open source database of chess games and puzzles, so let's double that heart: 💙💙
• Tests suite: pytest
• Hosting: Fly.io

Running locally

• Python: Entirely managed by uv. The make install command will make sure that the right version of uv is installed in the "bin/" folder - which is not ignored by git.
• Node.js: Make sure you have Node.js v18 installed.
  We recommend nvm to handle specific versions of Python and Node.js, but you can of course use whatever you want :-)

$ python -V
Python 3.11.x # <-- check that you get this output 🙂
$ node -v
v18.x.x # ditto

Once you have these two installed, you can clone the repository and install the dependencies:

$ make install
$ make dev

You can take a look at the Makefile to see more commands.

Roadmap

The roadmap now lives in a GitHub project:

https://github.com/users/olivierphi/projects/1/views/1

Contributing

Improvements and bugfixes are welcome, but also new "daily challenges"!

When playing chess online with other people, if you find yourself in a position that you think could be interesting for others to try to solve ♞, please feel free to open an issue to discuss its addition to the daily challenges database. 🙂

License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3 - see the LICENSE file for details.