And Now for Something Completely Different

2021.02.27 @gbtami Blog

Short history of pychess

Everything started with Lichess. We all love how Lichess has grown and gives us everything that chess players can imagine. However, some people still want more. There were requests to add S-chess, Bughouse, Placement chess and countless other chess variants to the site.

Around 2018-2019 several people started to work independently on interesting projects, and they all inspired the birth of the Pychess-Variants server.

Igor Perelyotov created a chessground fork to support Capablanca chess
CouchTomato announced his first version of an internationalized Shogi piece set on Reddit
Fabian Fichter forked Stockfish to implement several chess variants in Fairy-Stockfish

It was time to put these ingredients to the pot and start cooking.
Pychess's initial commit on GitHub happened on 2019.04.19. A couple of weeks later, I announced the project on Lichess. And finally, I played the very first human-human game on Pychess with Fabian on 2019.05.02.

ubdip: "Just in case you are curious, it was me playing against (I guess) you on your new server just a few minutes ago. I yesterday also tried a few bullet games against the engines, and it worked very nicely (although I of course stood no chance in any variant) no matter whether it was xiangqi, shogi, or the like. Although it is of course in an early stage, the UI and functionality already are quite nice, so keep up the good work."

gbtami: "Yes, I was really curious who was that brave man :) This first ever game immediately showed me that a basic chat window is a must. Anyhow thx for trying it in this very early stage!"

And then the server slowly started to evolve.

2019.06.23 Random-Mover BOT
2019.06.29 Games saved to mongodb database
2019.07.02 Internationalized Shogi and Xiangqi piece sets by @CouchTomato87
2019.08.09 960 option for Capablanca, Crazyhouse and Standard
2019.08.12 Capahouse
2019.08.15 S-House
2019.09.02 Grand chess
2019.09.03 Grandhouse
2019.09.30 Server side analysis via fairyfishnet
2019.10.01 Gothic chess and Gothhouse
2019.10.11 Minishogi
2019.11.02 Analysis chart
2019.11.15 Shako, Minixiangqi
2019.12.16 Glicko2 ratings
2019.12.17 Leaderboards
2019.12.20 Discord-Relay BOT
2019.12.28 Kyotoshogi
2020.01.28 Shogun chess
2020.02.02 Makruk pieces by @furumin999
2020.02.20 Crosstables
2020.02.20 Dobutsu pieces by @Ka_HU
2020.03.16 Board editor
2020.03.23 Switch from USI Shogi to UCI Shogi
2020.03.29 Janggi
2020.04.21 Makpong
2020.04.23 Orda chess
2020.05.03 Translations of Pychess site started
2020.07.04 Synochess
2020.08.09 Local, in browser analysis via Fairy-Stockfish WASM port
2020.08.14 Hoppel-Poppel
2020.09.15 Manchu, Dobutsu
2020.10.30 Blindfold mode
2020.11.08 Import games
2020.11.17 S-chess960
2021.01.31 Responsive layout/mobile support
2021.02.09 Embed games via iframe tag