#chess

2026-10-12 Show HN: Timur's Chess – A 14th century chess variant with giraffes unrated My weekend vibecoding project was to attempt to resurrect a 14th century chess variant favored by the Central Asian warlord Timur (Tamerlane). There are giraffes, elephants, citadels, and you can promote up to 2 additional kings! theres a working AI chess engine and relatively untested multiplayer

2026-09-16 Show HN: Chess Cheater Detector unrated I've been playing with this idea to build an estimation of chess cheating likelihood from an exported chess game (PGN format). The main thing I've developed so far is a way of estimating the complexity of each position. The intuition is that matching an engine's top moves in difficult positions is much more informative than doing so when there's an obvious best move. The detector currently combines complexity with engine agreement and centipawn loss to make a prediction. I'd like to move beyond the heuristics and train an ML model on a decent dataset of known cheating/non-cheating games. There is an obvious limitation though: I have fewer signals available than than Chess.com/Lichess. I generally don't have a player's game history, and most PGNs don't contain time-per-move data, both of which would presumably be very useful. Still pretty experimental, so I'd be interested in feedback; especially from anyone who's worked on chess engines, cheating detection, or related statistical problems.

2026-09-14 Show HN: MorphMove – a game where pieces change after moving unrated Hi HN, MorphMove is a perfect-information game inspired by fast chess and NYT games. It has 4 rules, games are fast, and it can be much harder than it seems. I’ve been trying to calculate a perfect-play outcome, but still haven’t found it. Would love your feedback, and will be available for any questions.

2026-09-07 Show HN: ChessNotate – Fix a broken PGN without branching into a new variation unrated Hi HN! I just built ChessNotate to turn my handwritten chess scoresheet into a clean PGN to solve my own pain points when it comes to capturing my games (and my son's) A lot of times my son and I make typos (accidentally mixing up B with b), or missing out moves through the middlegame and the frustrating part is when I try to validate it using PGN validator, if the PGN is invalid, it either rejects the PGN outright, or stops at the first error and everything else gets discarded. Then I have to fix the moves one by one. Worse, correcting a move usually gets treated as branching to a new variation ChessNotate validates the moves but it doesn't simply stop and discard past any errors. You can still see the rest of the moves which helps you to confirm if your fixes (including inserting or deleting moves) on the errors are correct. The lack of branching is on purpose because it's not an analysis tool so it's meant to do move correction Initially the plan was to use OCR to capture handwritten notes with Apple VisionKit to avoid paying for a frontier model but it didn't work out. It only detected tables on a really good photo and it couldn't reliably parse fairly neat handwriting so I decided just to discard the OCR idea and focus on the core problem of making it easy to fix PGN instead It's on the App Store now as a paid app (small one-time fee) and there's also a free web version available. The app is a UX upgrade over the web version with sound/haptic feedback, eval bar and a dedicated notation keypad built for iPhone

2026-09-07 Show HN: Blunderbase: A Personal Chess Database unrated I made a free and open source chess database. It's useful for personal game study and gathering statistics across sites. Supports import from lichess, chess.com, FICS and PGN then runs Stockfish and Maia over every game. With it you can analyze your games, take notes on positions and look up openings. The self hosted web version includes a remote-runner that allows connecting engines running on other machines (finally, the CPUs of the AI server at work come to use :D) and an MCP server with a live board to push positions and comments to. Roadmap: iOS and Android companion apps, a sync service, multi-engine analysis, and a correspondence game mode supporting multiple long running calculations. Looking forward to feedback and critique. Docker, Windows, Mac: https://blunderbase.org Demo: https://demo.blunderbase.org (read-only)