ChessCraft: Server and offline

ChessCraft

Play real chess, inside Minecraft

ChessCraft adds one block: a chess board. Craft it, set it down on any solid block, and right click it. That is the whole mod — no menus to configure, no extra items to hunt down.

Everything else is chess.

Two ways to play

1 Player — pick a difficulty and play against the engine:

Every game rolls a rating inside the band, so no two opponents feel quite the same. The easy bot spots hanging pieces and takes them, but it walks straight into tactics and misses long plans. The hard bot searches eight plies deep and will punish a loose knight from across the board.

2 Players — choose two players and you join the waiting list. The moment anyone else right clicks a board anywhere on the server, the two of you are paired and the game starts. Sides are drawn at random.

A real chess engine, written for this mod

The engine is not a lookup table of openings or a pile of random moves. It is a full alpha-beta searcher with iterative deepening, a Zobrist transposition table, quiescence search, null move pruning, late move reductions, killer moves and a history heuristic, sitting on an evaluation that understands piece-square tables, pawn structure, passed pawns, the bishop pair, rooks on open files and the pawn shield in front of your king.

Its move generation is verified against the standard perft positions — including 11,030,083 nodes deep in the endgame test position — so castling, en passant and promotion behave exactly the way they do in any real chess program.

It runs on its own thread. The server never stalls while the bot thinks.

Every rule, not just the easy ones

Castling, en passant, underpromotion, checkmate, stalemate, the fifty move rule, threefold repetition and draws by insufficient material are all handled and all reported properly when a game ends.

The board is really there

Pieces are drawn standing on the block itself, so a game in progress is visible to anyone walking past. Set a board down in your castle hall and it looks like a chess set, because it is one.

The playing surface is built from real Minecraft wood, so it sits naturally next to your build instead of looking pasted on.

Made to be played on servers

The server owns the game and validates every move it receives. The client runs the same engine only to light up the squares you can legally move to — it can never talk the server into an illegal move. Games survive you closing the screen: right click the board again and you are back where you left off.

Spectators can right click a board that is already in use and watch the game live.

Languages

Fully translated into English (US) and Spanish (Castilian).

Requirements

• Minecraft 1.21.1
• NeoForge 21.1.234 or newer

Crafting

W B W      W = White Wool
B W B      B = Black Wool
P P P      P = Any Planks