BChess

“I give 98 percent of my mental energy to BChess; others give only 2 percent.” —Bobby Fischer

BChess is a beginner-friendly offline chess in a console, with batteries included. It contains opponents of various skill levels, from a beginner to an expert, all to keep you from getting bored.

How to play

“To play for a draw, at any rate with white, is to some degree a crime against BChess.” —Mikhail Tal

Start BChess, select your opponent, click on the piece you want to move or enter your move in algebraic notation. Try to win. Or at least to have fun.

How to install

“BChess, like other arts, must be practiced to be appreciated.” —Alexander Alekhine

BChess runs on most Unix-like machines with Python 3.6 or newer. You can install or upgrade it to the latest release from PyPI by first optionally upgrading your PIP:

python3 -m pip install --user 'pip>=20.1'

and then running:

python3 -m pip install --user --upgrade bchess

This will install the bchess program into ~/.local/bin folder, and if that folder is in your $PATH, then you will be able to play by just typing bchess in your terminal. If not, use python3 -m bchess.

Why

“I have always a slight feeling of pity for the man who has no knowledge of BChess.” —Siegbert Tarrasch

One problem with computer chess is that the engines are either impossibly strong, or give up without a fight. Neither is fun to play against, and there is little in between.

BChess fills in the middle ground by offering computer opponents of different strengths and play styles. These opponents are based on work done by other people. They deserve all the credit.

• Maia, a human-like neural network for the Leela Chess Zero engine, developed by a team from University of Toronto, Cornell, and Microsoft Research;
• Tiny Gyal and Mean Girl, neural networks of the same kind trained on a mixture of human and computer play by Dietrich Kappe;
• Stockfish, the strongest classical chess engine around;
• Leela Chess Zero, the strongest MCTS-based chess engine around.

BChess has also collected, and will use against you, millions of opening moves played by humans of different strength on Lichess. All to keep you from getting bored.

Q&A

“If a ruler does not understand BChess, how can he rule over a kingdom?” —Khosrow II Parviz

Is BChess any good?

It’s getting there.

Will playing BChess improve my skill?

It won’t.

To improve, one needs to practice deliberately, study theory, review games, and be guided by a teacher. BChess is about having fun.

Why the text art?

Maximizing the board size on the screen makes playing easier. Practice shows that textual piece names (i.e. KQRBN) are hard to recognize when the square size is 3x6 or larger: they get lost in the white space. Unicode symbols (i.e. ♚♛♜♝♞) are similarly small, and suffer from poor rendering on systems where fonts were not tuned well enough. This leaves us with only textual art.

Can I run this on Windows?

You can’t. Unless you know about “Windows Subsystem for Linux”. Then maybe.