J-Chess: Play chess in the console!

A simple project allowing you to play chess within your console.

Usage

Requires python 3.10 or later. The package is available on pypi so to play simply install with pip install jchess and then play with jchess or python -m jchess.

The project was developed primarily alongside powershell but the project should be compatible with generic Windows and Linux consoles.

If you have any feedback please feel free to share it!

Features

J-Chess fully implements chess logic and rules - including castling, en-passant, promotion and check/checkmate.

It is primarily designed to be played by 2 people at the same computer but it does feature a "VS Dumb Bot" mode where you can play against an opponent who's moves are random.

For demonstration purposes there is also a "Two Dumb Bots" mode where an entire game is played with no user input.

Motivation

This was simply a project to better familiarize myself with programming in python and other lifecycle practices & tools.

I was able to practice using useful tools like git, github and wsl as well as useful concepts including OOP programming patterns, regular expressions, testing, documentation, packaging and managing dependencies.

The python tooling modules I used were:

Python code features I experimented with and used in the final project include dataclasses, generators, type annotations and context managers.

Scope

The goal of the project was to practice pure python programming so by design there are minimal 3rd party package dependencies - in fact there is only one: colorama.

The scope of the project was intentionally minimal, but some fun ideas if I return to this project would be:

• Implementing different guis - maybe through a web app or tkinter
• Implement a genuine AI
• Implement a non-local multiplayer mode

Project Structure

Not counting recursively, there are currently 8 sub-modules/packages which are published in the jchess whl (plus one module used only for testing). The project structure can be thought of as follows:

+-----------------------------------------------------+
|          pieces ---- board       display ------ run |
|         /                  \    /                   |
| geometry                    game                    |
|         \                  /    \                   |
|          terminal -- action      (testutils)        |
+-----------------------------------------------------+