Dev tools · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Printing Chess Boards in a Terminal
I'm doing some fun chess-related programing during my sabbatical, and taking the opportunity to dive down rabbit holes I'd avoid for in a work setting. Found out interesting stuff from old ANSI DEC escape sequences to sixel graphics that are useful today.
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Printing Chess Boards in a Terminal launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
- 1Chess Scanner▲123
Scan score sheets and generate chess games in seconds.
2024 · chessscanner.com · its alternatives →
- 2
- 3
Hey everyone, I have been trying to build a terminal based app for sometime now and this is an attempt at trying to build a chess app that one can play right inside terminal. I was inspired by `chess-tui`[1] which is a rust based project and was looking to build something similar using python. Luckily I stumbled upon textual[2] recently and it made my task of building this far more easier than I thought. [1] https://github.com/thomas-mauran/chess-tui [2] https://github.com/textualize/textual
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 4CE
We built ChessBoss at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon this week. It didn’t make the top 10 but I thought Hacker News might think it’s pretty cool. https://devpost.com/software/chess-boss There are these really cool smart chessboards that can suggest moves and track your games... but they’re $400 and weigh 19 pounds. And of course there are apps that can analyze games but tracking and inputting games by hand is a huge pain. Or fully-digital chess apps... but board games are way more fun in real life! We wondered: “why can’t you just do that in software and bring the best…
2019 · devpost.com · its alternatives →
- 5
SimplePLanes▲62An interactive airplane building game
2015 · store.steampowered.com · its alternatives →
- 6MW
Follow the discussion on YCombinator . I like to play chess. It is challenging, it requires strategic thinking and it is a great way to ...
2011 · codebazaar.blogspot.com · its alternatives →
- 7
Hello HackerNews, I'm Kaamkiya, the author of this program. It's a collection of minimal games made for terminals, like 2048, Hangman, and even two player games like pong. They're all text-based, but they can actually be quite fun. If you want to test it right now, you can do this: go run github.com/Kaamkiya/gg@latest I started this project out of boredom, honestly. I was bored, and when I'm bored I like to code or play video games. So I coded video games. I kept them really minimal though, because I'm not great at gamedev and thought it would be easier to contribute to text-based…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 8IM
2025 · screensaverchess.com · its alternatives →
- 9
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 →
- 10IB
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 →
- 11
Hi HN! I just built chessterm, a Rust-powered TUI chess engine to practice chess notation (PGN) for an upcoming chess competition. This was also a way for me to learn Rust more deeply, particularly bitboards for move generation and terminal UI development with ratatui Unlike typical chess UIs that wrap around Stockfish, this is built completely from scratch, with: - PGN-only input (no AI, just human vs human) - Bitboard-based move generation (u64, precomputed attack masks) - Built with ratatui for a smooth terminal experience Would love to hear your feedback!
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12ID
2012 · iamwil.posterous.com · 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
- 15
Free chess trainers for the parts of chess that aren
2021 · chessmadra.com · its alternatives →
- 16PC
2022 · observablehq.com · its alternatives →
- 17
I was having way too much free time even when i was working on 6-7 different projects at the same time with claude code and codex. Staring at the terminal when agents are cooking code for you was just too boring in the last 6-7 months so had to look for fun little side quests and ended up building a terminal arcade, it is still in its infancy and more of a personal hobby project. Out of all things, i ended up liking the bookshelf a lot when I built the post tool hook where i get a quote from a book for every 5th tool call, learning about new books became my daily habit now. It is open…
May 2026 · twitter.com · its alternatives →
- 18
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Hi HN, I’ve released a new version of chess-tui, a Rust terminal UI for playing live games against Lichess opponents. The update includes a cleaner TUI, better performance, improved keybindings, and smoother real-time integration with the Lichess API. It’s designed as a simple, fast way to play chess without leaving the terminal. Repo:https://github.com/thomas-mauran/chess-tui Feedback and bug reports are welcome. Happy to answer questions!
Dec 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 20
This is a project to bring the code from the book "Sargon a computer chess program" back to life in the modern era - billforsternz/retro-sargon
2020 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 21
I am a developer and a huge chess lover. I play mostly puzzles on Lichess. At some point I realized that I would love to have a similar puzzle-like game app for programming, so I built one! Please try it out and give me some feedback, any kind of feedback is warmly welcomed.
May 2026 · codequizz.com · its alternatives →
- 22
So, I've never written a line of Rust in my life. I wouldn't know an `&mut this` from a mutandis. But I saw a tweet about a month ago that said, in this new era of AI, you'd be able to just take a library that you love, throw a TUI around it, and call it an app. So I spent about 200 bucks last month, here's what I came up with: Imbolc is a DAW that runs entirely in your terminal. It talks to scsynth over OSC and ships 58 instruments and 39 effects. VSTs are a work in progress, also GarageBand loops if you want to recreate "Umbrella". The codebase is about 60k? lines of Rust across 5 crates,…
Feb 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Test your prompt engineering skills by writing prompts and battling them against each other! Your prompt template can access the board state, the move history, and a list of legal moves, and the game engine selects the first legal move in the string response from the LLM you query. My best prompt so far ignores the board state and the move history and just tries to play mates, make captures, and promote pawns. Can you do better?
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 24
Don't Blunder, a chess middlegame trainer
Oct 2025 · dontblunder.com · its alternatives →
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