Playing chess in your terminal

Jonni still hasn’t written a 10-page feature on chess, so Neil Mohr starts playing the classic strategy game in his terminal while he waits…

- Neil Mohr

Known to be over 1,200 years old, chess remains a key test of strategy, mental ability, computational power and is generally a good way of passing the time. If you can represent an eight by eight grid with suitable symbols for the pieces then you can have a game of chess. So why not play chess in your terminal?

While we wait for Jonni to write something far more engaging and informative on how to have fun with chess and open source, we’ll have to make do with the slim pickings we can squeeze into these two pages. Partly this was all kicked off by stumbling across a dreadfully written bespoke open source chess game, which had some ginormous fixed-state machine built from an unfathomable number of nested if statements. So, stuff that for a party.

As Jonni will go into far more depth than space allows here when he gets around to writing his legendary chess feature, there’s no need to reinvent the chess-shaped wheel. There are a host of accomplished open source chess engines which any front-end that feels the need can plug into. The most common is one called Stockfish often described as “the strongest conventional chess engine in the world” and who are we to argue?

Install the chess engine

The first thing you’ll want to do is install Stockfish. The version in the repository will be fine, and in these Ubuntu 20.04 days that would be the current v11-1 release. A sudo apt install stockfish will do the trick.