This is a beta
It is free, and there is nothing to buy. No payments, no ads, no accounts. Rules and screens still change, sometimes in ways that will not match a game you played last week.
We are not charging for anything yet and have not set a date for it. If that ever changes, it will be written here first.
What we do not collect
There is no account and no sign-up. Your games and your record live in your browser. Your moves travel to the server to be judged, but nothing is stored unless the game is a ladder or invite game. There is no advertising or third-party tracking script on this site.
Because it lives in your browser, clearing site data erases it and it does not follow you to another device.
How the rules are judged
Legal moves come from Fairy-Stockfish, the same engine lichess and pychess use for variants. It runs on our server, so the board never invents a move the engine did not allow.
Not here yet
There is a ladder: finish a game and submit the moves, and the server replays them to rank the result. What is not built is live matchmaking, so you play the resident bots, pass a device back and forth, or send an invite link to a friend.
The one thing we do send
Once per visit your browser sends us a single line: the furthest step you reached, which variant and augment you were playing, whether you picked that augment yourself or the bot did, whether your opponent was a bot, which language the page was in, whether the game was resumed from a link, whether you shared a game, where you left off mid-game (which move number and how many seconds, nothing before your first move), and **the date you visited**. That is the entire message. The date carries no time of day, only the year, month and day. We need it to tell before from after when we add something new, and a date is enough for that. If you mark one of the maybe-paid items, that item is sent on its own line at that moment, and nothing else goes with it. On the gauntlet, opening the list and which rung you attempt or clear are sent on their own line at that moment, because we cannot fix the rung people get stuck on unless we know which one it is. If something breaks on screen, that fact reaches the same place too: we send only the error name (TypeError, for example) and an eight-character fingerprint of where it happened, never the error message, the stack, or the address, because what you wrote could be inside them. Nothing else goes with either.
We do not read your IP address, your browser string, or the referrer your browser offers, and this app sets no cookies of its own. When you post a score, the leaderboard service (ranks.gwirae.com) sets two cookies (rk_k and rk_s) to recognize your device; see ranks.gwirae.com/privacy. The one exception is a label we put in our own links: if you arrived through a link we published or a game someone shared, that link carried a short word like "share", and we read that word back. Links we did not make carry nothing, and those visits are simply "direct" to us. Nothing ties one line to another line, or to you. This is not a promise to behave; there is simply no identifier to work with.
We send it because otherwise we cannot see where people give up, and a game nobody finishes is a game we cannot fix.
What stays free, and what might not
Free, and staying that way
- Playing games, against bots or another person
- Every chess variant and every augment
- The augment draft, with the same choices for both sides
- Ranked play, whenever it exists
- Sharing a game by link, and replaying one you were sent
- Puzzles
- Server-judged legal moves, which is what makes the rules trustworthy
Lichess has run on this promise for years: chess for everyone, forever, no ads and no subscriptions. That is the standard in this corner of the internet, and we would rather meet it than explain why we did not.
Things we might charge for later
Some of these are built and the rest are marked. None has a price until sales open. We name them now because saying nothing would be worse.
If one of these would matter to you, say so. It tells us what to build first.
- Piece styles and profile decoration (not built yet)It changes how the game looks, not what is legal or who wins.
- Three board color themes: ink wash, rice cake, and chestnutIt changes how the board looks, not what is legal or who wins. Ranking never depends on board color.
- Move-by-move review of every game, with the engine's preferred moveIt runs after the game is over. Both players get the same rules while the game is being played.
- Unlimited engine hints against botsA game where you take a hint stays off the ladder, so it never changes a ranking. Free players get five a day.
- A fourth draft card in bot and pass-and-play gamesRanked games stay at three cards for everyone, and a four-card game stays off the ladder.
- Unlimited replays of a position from your own game reviewIt happens after the game is over, on a board that no longer counts. Both players played the same game under the same rules.
- Keeping your games somewhere other than this browser (not built yet)Storage, not strength. Nothing about it changes a position on the board.
The line we will not cross
We will never sell anything that affects who wins a ranked game. In ranked play both players get the same draft choices, the same augments, and three cards each. A four-card draft or an engine hint keeps that game off the ladder. When Hearthstone Battlegrounds sold an upgrade that widened the starting choice from two heroes to four, it moved average win rate by about five points and the community called it pay-to-win the same week. That is the mistake we are designing around, not one we are hoping to avoid.
If you are playing now
Everything you can do today stays free for you. We will not put a price on something you were already using, and if anything changes we will write it here before it happens, not after.
Tell us. A rule that reads wrong, a position the board drew badly, an augment that feels off. Those reports are the fastest way this gets better.
This goes to our server log, which we read directly. There is no account behind it, so please do not include your name or contact details. We cannot write back.