PyChess ♟️

Play chess in the terminal!

Written in Python, this project is made in part of Boot.dev Hackathon July 2025

Note

This is still a work-in-progress with missing features.

Requirements

• Python: 3.13+
• Package Manager: uv (recommended for managing dependencies)
• Platform: ✔️Linux, ❓macOS, ❓Windows

Dependencies

• textual - python terminal ui library
• rich - python library for rendering rich text
• pygame - python game framework library

Install & Setup

1. Install uv

# Linux and macOS
curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh

# Windows
powershell -ExecutionPolicy ByPass -c "irm https://astral.sh/uv/install.ps1 | iex"

2. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/Nightails/pychess.git
cd pychess

3. Install dependencies (optional - uv takes care of it)

# Install project dependencies
uv install

4. Run PyChess

uv run main.py

Roadmap & Personal Note

1. To-do:

• Move rule
• Piece taking
• AI opponents
• Multiplayer
• Theme

2. Notes:

This project was hastily put together over a 3 days weekend. So existence of python-chess was unknown to me until recently. It is more reason to finish this someday with my own back-end for handling: moves validation, rules, and check-mate checking, etc.

Front-end is being handled by textual. Though more research still need to be done, as I's exposed to the library for only 2 days.

Contributions are welcome!

PyChess is under MIT license.