What is ChessBot?

ChessBot was made to allow you and your friends to play chess together directly on discord! Duel each other in friendly games of chess, and allow others to come spectate your epic match (or not! That's up to you).

How does it work?

You can duel someone in a discord server with the command $duel @someone. The bot will then ask the person you tagged to either accept or refuse the duel. Once the duel is accepted, the game can start!

A new channel will be created (and will be deleted at the end of the duel, don't worry discord admins) in which the duel will take place. Only you and the person you're dueling with can access the channel, unless you made it public (more on that later). However, others can join as spectators by reacting to the duel message, unless you made it private (again, more on that later). Spectators can use reactions, but they cannot send messages in the duel channel.

The bot will randomnly assign the white and black pieces, and the game will start! Every turn, the bot will post an updated image showing the board, and highlighting the previous move, aswell as the list of captured pieces, and more usefull info.

To take a turn, simply use the $move command (or $m for short). Each piece has a short name/id showed on its top left. To move that piece, use $move [piece id] [cell] where the [piece id] is the one showed on the piece, and the cell are the coordinates of the cell you wish to move your piece to.
For exemple, if I wanted to move my 3rd pawn (P3) to the c3 cell, I would use "$m p3 c3" (note that the piece's id and the cell's coordinates aren't caps sensitive). And that's pretty much it! The bot shows a short help message to remind you of all this at the start of every duel channel.

Public & Private duels

Don't want anybody on the server comming to spectate your game? No problem! Simply add the "private" keyword at the end of the "$duel" command, and nobody will be able to spectate (e.g: $duel @someone private).

Or maybe you're organising a tournament, and you want everyone to see the channel? Well simply use the "public" keyword at the end of your "$duel" command (e.g: $duel @someone public)!

Notes for discord server admins

Are you an admin who wants to add this bot to your server? Here are some tips for you!
ChessBot will always create the duel channels in the same category as the text channel where the "$duel" command was used. To keep everything in order, I recommend having a special category where ChessBot can acess the channels, and thus see the "$duel" commands, and restrict his access on the rest of the server.

ChessBot will always delete the duel channel once the duel has concluded (or once it has timed out). If it doesn't, it means something went very wrong, in which case please submit a bug report so I can fix it!

If you're using logger bots, like Dyno, you might want to restrict their access to the chess channels categories, as ChessBot will delete the previous boards as the game goes on.

Bug Reports & Github

If you encounter any bugs, please submit a bug report on the Github issues page. Don't forget to provide a screenshot, and be as descriptive as possible!
If you want to check out ChessBot's code, it is entirely open source and available on this Github repo .