All projects

CompleteUpdated Added

Claude Chess

A browser chess game against a built-in bot with four difficulty levels, time controls, and the full rules, written from scratch in plain JavaScript with no libraries.

Visit Claude Chess (opens in a new tab)Visit GitHub Repo (opens in a new tab)

About this project

The goal of this Claude Code project was to test whether Claude was "smart" enough to make a chess engine that could beat me. Now, this was not a very scientific test; it was more just to see what would happen. I went into this knowing that there was already a fairly robust, public area of study for portable chess bots, with material such as this YouTube video about a chess bot tournament from Sebastian Lague (opens in a new tab).

In short: this experiment was a success. If I really cared about building this out, I could; however, there are many, many free online chess applications where users can play against bots and against other humans. So for now, this will remain an interesting two-shot experiment.

Screenshots

The New Game setup form with Easy, Medium, Hard and Impossible difficulty cards, time control options and a Play as colour choice. (view full size)
The setup screen where difficulty, time control and colour are chosen before a game.
A chess board after three moves with the white knight on f3 selected and dots marking its legal destination squares. (view full size)
Selecting a piece highlights its legal moves with shape-based markers.

Resources