Just Chess

Just Chess is a chess game for solo play and online matches. You can play standard chess or Chess960, practice against computer engines, solve puzzles, enter tournaments and connect to Lichess. Games take place on a 3D board, with tools for reviewing moves and analyzing positions.

Play against engines

Play offline against the built-in chess engine, or connect external engines that support the UCI protocol, such as Stockfish. UCI engines can play at or beyond grandmaster strength, and can also play Chess960. Both the built-in and UCI engines can adjust their strength based on your wins and losses. You can change engine move speed and difficulty, and manage multiple UCI profiles by creating, renaming and saving them. Profile settings include Hash (RAM), Threads (CPU), Skill Level and engine-specific parameters.

When playing against the computer, you can use tools to assess moves and positions. Post-move analysis marks moves as good, inaccurate, mistakes or blunders and shows the best move; hints identify and color-code the three best options, with continuations you can preview on the board. Move analysis evaluates a selected piece and can show a variation, while threat analysis displays the opponent’s threats with arrows and evaluations. These tools, including hints, the evaluation bar and piece analysis, are not available in Chess960 games. You can toggle analysis tools from a side menu to save hardware resources.

Tournaments and puzzles

Play offline tournaments against the built-in engine or imported UCI engines. UCI tournaments can generate opponents at different skill levels; you choose the number of participants and can save and resume progress from the intermission panel. The four tournament modes are Simulated, Arena, Survival and Time Attack.

Engine-versus-engine tournaments pit your custom UCI profiles against each other. Choose Round Robin, where everyone plays everyone; Swiss, where winners face winners; or Gauntlet, where one engine plays against all the others. You can view final cross-tables, skip animations and copy the tournament’s PGN to the clipboard. Puzzle Arena draws on a Lichess database of over four million puzzles, with Puzzle Blitz and Puzzle Run modes.

Play and follow on Lichess

Log in to Lichess from the game to challenge friends or other players, play standard chess or Chess960, and face Lichess’s Stockfish engine at different difficulty levels. You can continue ongoing correspondence or real-time games, and online games synchronize with your Lichess account. Bullet and Blitz games cannot be played directly through the game, but a browser link is provided; tournaments are not available in Lichess mode.

You can also follow Lichess games in progress, watch live broadcasts and grandmaster games, and view standard chess and Chess960. For supported live broadcasts, Live Game Analysis shows the engine’s suggested move on the board. A view-only analysis board can sit beside the main board while you follow a live or finished broadcast.

Board and game tools

The 3D board has adjustable viewing angles and smooth camera controls. You can flip the view, rotate the camera in 90-degree increments or reset it to your playing side. Timed games include Bullet (1+0), Blitz (5+3), Rapid (10+5) and Classical (30+0, 90/40); untimed play is also available. Time controls under 10 minutes work with both the built-in and UCI engines. Switch between 2D and 3D chess clocks, and move back and forth through the full game history with undo and redo.

Other tools include manual board setup, which lets you drag pieces into any position, and an opening display that shows the name and ECO code and updates as moves are played or taken back. Spoken announcements cover moves, captures, checks and the final result. You can adjust their volume or turn them off. A music player includes hundreds of tracks, with volume, skip, mute, loop and shuffle controls, and remembers its power setting between sessions. The theme manager lets you change piece, square, board-edge and table colors, as well as piece size. You can also copy games in PGN format for analysis on online chess services.