Intro to Programming

Chess

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CanvasGame searchHTML UI

As with other two-person board games, there are a number of aspects you could implement.

• Making a board that allows humans to move pieces around and capture other pieces.
• Enforce the rules so illegal moves aren't allowed.
• Add something to the UI to show legal moves, e.g. when the user clicks on a piece to move, highlight or mark the squares the piece can legally move to.

Rendering the chess board can be done with a Canvas (similar to the Chess board playground) or with HTML. Using Canvas will give you more control but also requires you to do more work to draw things exactly.

You can render the pieces with the Unicode chess characters like in the Chess board playground or you could figure out how to use images or even write code to draw them yourself.

Independent of drawing the board and letting players play, you could also experiment with writing a computer player. While chess is much more complex than, say, tic tac toe, the same basic principles of game search apply. The trick with chess is you need a way to evaluate how good an arbitrary position is since you can't search all the way to the end of the game the way you can with tic tac toe. Writing a good chess player is a major project but coming up with something that at least plays some kind of not terrible chess might be a doable but ambitious project.