Chess Ta!
Offline chess with an NNUE engine, a real 3D board, and analysis tools.
NNUE neural network 17 chess variants MMC Solo Dev
The engine
The evaluation is an NNUE neural network — 256 hidden units over 768 input features, quantised int16, QA 255 / QB 64 — written in C and compiled straight into the app. It is trained from self-play by a Go trainer, quantised to 16-bit integers, and evaluated incrementally so the search can afford to call it at every node.
That trained network is what standard chess plays on. The variants share the same search but currently use the engine's hand-written evaluation instead — their own networks are not trained yet, which is explained in full on the variants page. Nothing here is Stockfish or a wrapper around someone else's engine: the whole thing is written from scratch in C.
The rules, and seventeen ways to bend them
Standard chess, plus Chess960 (Fischer Random). Eleven opponent tiers run from a deliberately gentle beginner up to a full-strength engine, so the same app works for someone learning the moves and someone studying an opening.
Beyond that the app ships seventeen chess variants, each a real rule set with its own move generator rather than a cosmetic mode. Blow pieces up in Atomic, drop captured material back onto the board in Crazyhouse, run your king to the centre in King of the Hill, play half-blind in Dark Chess, or hold off thirty-six pawns in Horde. Version 1.4.0 added five more that each change a single rule of ordinary chess.
See all 17 variants and how they play →
What you get
- Play offline against eleven difficulty tiers, from beginner to full strength
- Seventeen chess variants — Atomic, Crazyhouse, King of the Hill, Duck Chess, Dark Chess, Horde and more
- A real 3D board rendered with three.js, alongside the classic 2D board
- Analysis board with an evaluation bar and Best Move hints
- Game review: step through a finished game move by move
- PGN library — import, browse and review your own games
- Custom position setup, pass & play on one device, and AI vs AI
- Board and piece themes, and full offline operation
Screens
Click any image to view it full size. The 3D shots are the real board renderer, captured from the same page the app ships.
