chess-engine

A desktop chess application built with Tauri + Svelte, backed by a from-scratch Rust chess engine (in progress).

Status

• Plan 1: chess-core — complete. Bitboard rules library, FEN/PGN, perft-validated.
• Plan 2: playable board — complete. Tauri + Svelte UI; hot-seat play with undo/redo, FEN load, PGN save/load, game-over banner.
• Plan 3: Stockfish integration — complete. Engine picker per side (Human / Stockfish + Skill 0-20). Stockfish auto-plays. Always-on analysis with eval bar + top-3 candidate moves.
• Plan 4+: DIY engine — upcoming. Build a club-strength engine from scratch in Rust (perft → material → alpha-beta → quiescence → TT → ordering → eval → null-move).

Run

npm install
npm run tauri dev

Bundled engine

The app ships with Stockfish 17 (GPL-3.0) at src-tauri/binaries/. It's launched as a child process and communicated with via UCI over stdin/stdout. Skill Level 0 plays around 1100 Elo; Skill Level 20 is full strength.

Limitations (Plan 3)

• Pawn promotion auto-defaults to Queen (no picker UI yet).
• History sidebar is read-only — clickable navigation to past positions is a planned follow-up.
• No DIY engine yet — Plan 4+.
• No engine-vs-engine mode yet — Plan 4+.
• No "hints off" / training mode toggle yet.

Attribution

• Chess piece graphics: Cburnett (Wikimedia, CC-BY-SA 3.0). See ATTRIBUTION.md.
• Stockfish 17: GPL-3.0, https://stockfishchess.org/