A chess experiment

Chess
in 64
pixels

Every piece is a color. Nothing more.
The game at its most essential.

Morphy vs Duke of Brunswick & Count Isouard  ·  Paris, 1858
Play now
Discover
The concept

Function
over
design.

Traditional chess boards represent pieces as icons — knights as horses, bishops as miters, kings as crowns. The visual noise is there before you've even thought about your move.

pxchess strips this away entirely. Six pieces. Six colors. The King is red. The Queen is magenta. The Knight is cyan. The Bishop is green. The Rook is indigo. The Pawn is amber.

Once you know the code, you stop seeing pieces and start seeing pure strategy — positions, tensions, threats. The board becomes a logic map.

That's not a limitation. It's a more immersive way to play.

King Red  ·  The one that must survive
Queen Magenta  ·  The most powerful
Rook Indigo  ·  Controls the lines
Bishop Green  ·  Owns the diagonals
Knight Cyan  ·  The unpredictable one
Pawn Amber  ·  The foot soldiers
Three ways to see it
For chess players
Train your pattern recognition
When pieces have no shape — only color — you're forced to read the board differently. Positions, not icons. Threats, not silhouettes. A harder, more rewarding mental exercise.
vs Stockfish · 21 levels
For developers
One HTML file. That's it.
The entire game — engine, UI, animations, splash screen — runs in a single self-contained HTML file. Conceived and built through Claude AI prompting only. No frameworks, no build step.
Claude AI · Prompt-only
For minimalists
64 pixels as a design statement
Eight by eight. Six colors. An entire universe compressed into its smallest possible expression. pxchess is a constraint made into aesthetic — where less is genuinely more.
Pixel art · Concept art
pxchess · Anthology

Twenty brilliant
moves that changed history

The greatest games ever played, reduced to their essential form. Each pauses at the decisive moment — waiting for you to reveal the move.

Explore the anthology →
About

Conceived by a human.
Built with an AI.

pxchess was designed by Grégory Clément — the concept, the visual language, the color palette, every design decision.

The code was written entirely through Claude AI, Anthropic's AI assistant, using natural language prompting only. No line of code was written by hand.

It's an experiment in human-AI collaboration: the human holds the vision, the AI holds the keyboard.

Technical specs
Engine Stockfish 10 (WebAssembly)
Chess rules chess.js 0.12
Rendering Pure CSS · 64 div elements
Dependencies 2 external scripts
File size 1 HTML file · ~60kb
Framework None
Build step None
Built with Claude AI (Anthropic)
Play.

Free. No account. No install. Just chess.

Open the board →