The chess game on the site has been completely rebuilt from the ground up. The old board had rendering issues — pieces looked smeared or blurry on certain screens. The new version fixes all of that and adds a full suite of advanced options.
Crisp Piece Rendering — White and black pieces now use CSS text-shadow for sharp outlines at any screen size. Gone is the old -webkit-text-stroke approach that caused blurring. Pieces render cleanly on Retina displays, 1080p monitors, and mobile screens alike.
Board Themes — Choose from four board color schemes: Green (classic Lichess look), Classic (warm brown tones), Blue (slate blue), and Walnut (dark wood feel). Themes switch instantly without restarting the game.
Play as White or Black — Select your color before each game. When you choose Black, the board automatically flips so you always play from the bottom. A new 2 Players option also lets two people play on the same screen.
Flip Board — A dedicated Flip button lets you rotate the perspective at any time, useful when reviewing positions or when playing 2-player mode.
Undo Move — Made a mistake? The Undo button steps back a full move — both your move and the AI's response are reversed in one click. Undo is available at any point during the game.
Promotion Dialog — When a pawn reaches the back rank, a clean overlay appears letting you choose any piece: Queen, Rook, Bishop, or Knight. Previously the game auto-promoted to Queen with no choice.
Last Move Highlighting — The from and to squares of the previous move are highlighted in a subtle contrasting color, making it easy to track what just happened.
Difficulty Levels — Easy, Medium, and Hard remain. Easy adds noise to the AI evaluation for unpredictable play. Medium uses depth-2 search. Hard uses depth-3 with full alpha-beta pruning and move ordering.
The game is still 100% client-side, no downloads, no signup. Play it at /tools/games/chess.