Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Can a person's chess mind outlive them? An attempt with 41 masters
Two years ago I sat down to build a chess engine for my kids' Christmas present. Wanted it to play badly enough to be beatable but not randomly bad: different styles so they could choose what to face. While building those styles I noticed the choices started looking like actual historical players' tendencies. Went looking. Turns out: given enough games from one person, you can extract enough of their decision pattern to reproduce it. Two years later, 41 players, ~3,000 games each. Tal sacrifices unsoundly. Morphy attacks like it's 1850. Capablanca grinds endgames. Same engine underneath,…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1WU
Chess openings visualized from over 800 million Lichess games, 2 million tournament games and 1 million chess engine games.
2019 · chessroots.com · its alternatives →
- 2CA
2021 · chrisbutner.github.io · its alternatives →
- 3
I made a chess engine today, and made it fit within 2KB. I used a variant of MinMax called Negamax, with alpha beta pruning. For the board representation I have used a 120-cell "mailbox". I managed to squeeze in checkmate/stalemate in there, after trimming out some edge cases. I am a great fan of demoscene (computer art subculture) since middle school, and hence it was a ritual i had to perform. For estimating the Elo, I measured 240 automated games against Stockfish Elo levels (1320 to 1600) under fixed depth-5 and some constrained rules, using equal color distribution. Then converted…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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- 6IT
I built 1e4.ai - a chess web app where you play against neural networks trained to mimic human Lichess players at specific Elo ranges. There's a separate model for each 100-point rating bucket from ~800 to 2200+, and the bots not only choose human-like moves but also burn clock time, play worse under time pressure, and blunder in human-like ways. Live demo: https://1e4.ai Code: https://github.com/thomasj02/1e4_ai A few things that might be interesting: - Trained on almost a full year of Lichess blitz games, around 1B total games - Architecture is an a small…
May 2026 · its alternatives →
- 7
Hi, this is my first HN submission so please forgive the rough edges. For this project gathered chess positions from some well-known chess players with a lot of games. (Usually ~25k games and 1M+ positions. The most for any player was GM Aman Hambleton with 1.8M positions indexed.) With each board position I create a probability distribution of moves the player has made from that position. Then, I simply draw from that distribution (with sampling temperature) to choose a move. As long as there's at least one game with a given position, you can keep playing. You'll see that it's pretty easy…
2022 · d2frm2q2a7fq8v.cloudfront.net · its alternatives →
- 8
Half chess▲76A casual chess game where games only last 5 minutes
2020 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 9
Chess pattern training. No timers, no streaks, no ratings.
Jun 2026 · boxwoodchess.com · its alternatives →
- 10
LearnChess▲29I've been playing chess for a few years with my ELO stuck around 1600 on Lichess. I wanted an app that combined puzzle training, interactive lessons, game analysis, and AI coaching in one place. But all the apps I used over the years either felt overwhelming, had UX that wasn't up to my expectations for a modern app or were lacking some fundamental features that I really wanted. So, I built LearnChess.ai. The technical angle I'm most excited about: it's built local-first using LiveStore (event-sourced, SQLite on-device), which means zero loading delays for user data and full offline support.…
Jul 2026 · learnchess.ai · its alternatives →
- 11
Guess AI Engine Tournament Position, Fun Stury Tool. Play Chess Without Moving Pieces. Crazy Chess is a Variant of Random Fisher and Really Bad Chess. Because of the rearranged pieces, players cannot use typical chess opening moves. study tool to understand chess, and learning how to read the board.
2017 · ba.net · its alternatives →
- 12
I built a chess game where every piece-type is an AI agent with its own personality. Just type "Use https://chessminds.fun /play.md to start a chess game" in your claude code.
May 2026 · chessminds.fun · its alternatives →
- 13OC
My personal project: https://github.com/leonidasdeim/chasse Goal was to build session based chessboard game without any rules - to play just like oldschool over the board. Just create new board and share link with a friend. I would appreciate any feedback and github star. Thanks!
2023 · chasse.fun · its alternatives →
- 14
Chess Twist▲29I continue my experiment of transposing classic games onto an irregular grid. I've previously released variants of minesweeper and checkers. And now I'd like to share my variant of Chess. Chess can be a pretty punishing game, but I thought this was nevertheless a way to make it even more challenging by making it trickier to anticipate your opponent, even though both players still have the same information. From the playtests I've done, that challenge is pretty compelling. It also seems to be more fun at 2 people, where both players keep surprising one another.
2024 · polyreplay.com · its alternatives →
- 15
Schmess▲4Solo dev here. Schmess is chess with the turn structure removed. Both players move whenever they have a free slot, and every piece freezes on a cooldown after it moves. It's on a half board, with 100+ puzzle stages. If two people played this over a physical board they'd scrape each other's fingers raw - that's roughly the tempo. Plays in the browser, no signup. 29 stages free, one-time unlock for the rest ($3.99 / Rs 149). No subscription, no ads. It's the second of a few small-board variants I'm building (halfchess was the first, more coming). Building a chess engine for a game with no…
Jul 2026 · schmess.com · its alternatives →
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DualChess▲25Chess — but a mini-game decides every capture
Jun 2026 · dualchess.com · its alternatives →
- 18
I built this because I got tired of Stockfish giving me evaluations (+0.5) without explaining the actual plan. Most opening explorers focus on statistics (Win/Loss/Draw). I wanted a tool that explains the strategic intent behind the moves (e.g., "White plays c4 to clamp down on d5" vs just "White plays c4"). The Project: Comprehensive Database: I’ve mapped and annotated over 3,500 named opening variations. It covers everything from main lines (Ruy Lopez, Sicilian) to deep sidelines. Strategic Visualization: The UI highlights key squares and draws arrows based on the textual…
Jan 2026 · atlaschess.me · its alternatives →
- 19
QuipSeek▲6Master the chaos: Spatial logic meets linguistic skill.
Jan 2026 · quipseek.com · its alternatives →
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As I was playing with the Outlines library (https://outlines-dev.github.io/outlines/), I discussed with my friend Maxime how funny it would be if we set up a way to pair LLMs in chess matches till one wins. The first time I tried it, it required substantial prompt engineering to get some of those LLMs to propose valid moves. Large language models can mostly stay focused and even play rather well; see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37616170 for example. However small language models aren't as easy to convince. Some of those LLMs have seen very little…
2024 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
- 22
Identify patterns in your mistakes to get better at chess
Jul 2026 · e4coach.com · its alternatives →
- 23IB
Hi HN, here is my humble weekend project. I couldn’t find any similar utilities online that would let me download all of my chess games, so I decided to make one. It’s definitely imperfect, so please let me know if you have any feedback!
2023 · chessgamedownloader.fly.dev · its alternatives →
- 24
ChessBout▲12Multiple-choice chess duels & daily challenges ♟️
May 2026 · chessbout.com · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →