Chess Engine

A local two-player chess game built with Python and Pygame. Click a piece, then click a legal square. The board tracks turns, filters illegal moves that leave your king in check, and ends the game on checkmate or stalemate.

There is also a random self-play simulator that picks legal moves for both sides.

Features

• Standard starting position and all six piece types
• Legal-move generation (pawns, knights, bishops, rooks, queens, kings)
• Moves that would leave your own king in check are blocked
• Check, checkmate, and stalemate detection with on-screen results
• Click-to-move local play (White vs Black on one computer)
• Optional random self-play (rsim)
• Debug helpers to print the current board or the last saved state

Requirements

• Python 3.9+
• pygame
• pywinstyles (used to style the window title bar on Windows)

pip install pygame pywinstyles

Run

From the project root:

python run.py

That launches the two-player game (src/main.py).

To watch random self-play instead, open run.py and swap the calls:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    # main()
    rsim()

Then run python run.py again.

Controls

Input	Action
Left click	Select a piece, then select a destination
P	Print the current board to the terminal
H	Print the last saved board state

Project layout

ChessEngine/
├── run.py              # Entry point
├── assets/             # Piece sprites
└── src/
    ├── main.py         # Two-player Pygame loop
    ├── rsim.py         # Random self-play loop
    ├── board.py        # Board state, turns, check / mate
    └── piece.py        # Piece movement

Status

Human vs computer is not implemented yet (run.py has a TODO for it). Special moves such as castling, en passant, and pawn promotion are also still out of scope.

License

No license is attached to this repository yet. Add one if you want others to reuse the code.