How Chesslord works
Chesslord takes a flat picture of a chess position and gives you the same position on a board you can play. This page says what it does, what it cannot do, and what it costs.
The image is the input
Most positions worth studying are already in front of you as a picture. A diagram in a book you photographed, a page out of a PDF, a screenshot from a stream or a group chat. You upload that file. There is no board to set up and no squares to retype.
The position comes back as notation
FEN is the single line of text that every chess program uses to write down a position. Chesslord reads your image into one, and that string is what the board and the engine both work from.
The board stays live
What comes back is a board, not a screenshot of an answer. Play the engine’s move, or ignore it and play your own, and keep going until you can see why the position holds or wins.
The engine is yours, not ours
Stockfish runs in your browser, on your machine. The first analysis downloads about 7 MB of engine, and after that it comes from your browser’s cache. Nothing about the position you are studying waits in a queue behind another user, and nothing waits for one of our servers to wake up.
A wrong square is fixed on the board
Reading pieces off an image is never going to be perfect. A low resolution scan, an unusual piece set, a watermark across the board: any of those can produce a square that came back wrong. So the position arrives editable. You drop the right piece on the square that is wrong, and the notation and the engine follow straight away.
What it reads, and what it refuses to guess at
- Diagrams printed in books and magazines
- Pages exported from PDFs and ebooks
- Screenshots from streams, apps and analysis boards
- Position images pasted into chats and posts
- Photographs of a physical board, at any angle
- Video, or a position that is still moving
- Handwritten scoresheets and move lists
A photographed 3D board is a harder problem with a worse answer, so Chesslord does not pretend to solve it. Flat diagrams it can be held to.
What it costs
Nothing. Chesslord is free and non-commercial. An account is required to use it at all: there is no anonymous mode, and no paid tier either. The account is what keeps the positions you upload, so one you studied last week is still there when you want it again.