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Linebook
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About Linebook

Linebook is a chess site for playing, solving puzzles and learning openings. It is free, it has no ads, and it started as a university project.

What you can do today

  • Play a bot: 8 of them, from Tilly at about 400 to Sasha at about 2200, each with a style of its own. Hints, takebacks and an evaluation bar are there when you want them.
  • Play a friend. Send a link; your friend can join as a guest with just a name for a casual game.
  • Solve puzzles. A daily puzzle, and a rated path that gets harder as you get better.
  • Read the blog: opening guides, classic games and notes on how the site works.

What comes next

  • Online play: get paired with a player near your rating, by time control.
  • Opening courses: learn lines move by move, then repeat them until they stick.
  • More languages than English.

How it works

The bots, hints and evaluation bar run the Stockfish engine inside your browser, so a game against a bot never waits on a server. Games against people run on a small game server that checks every move and keeps the clocks.

Ratings use the Elo system and start at 1500. How chess ratings work explains the details.

Credits

Linebook builds on other people's free work. Thank you to:

  • Stockfish and Stockfish.js, the engine behind the bots, under the GNU GPL v3. The engine files the site serves are unchanged from the stockfish package on npm.
  • The Lichess puzzle database (CC0), where every puzzle here comes from.
  • The Maestro pieces by sadsnake1, as shipped with Lichess, under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.
  • The 3D Staunton pieces and boards by clarkerubber (MIT).
  • Move sounds from Lichess: the Futuristic, NES, Piano and SFX sets by Enigmahack (AGPL v3) and the Lisp set by EdinburghCollective (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
  • The Alpha, Merida and Symbola chess fonts by Eric Bentzen, Armando Hernandez Marroquin and George Douros (free to use), as bundled with Jummania Chess (MIT), whose board colours are in Settings too.

The other Linebook piece sets and the bot portraits were made for this site. The Chess.com sets and boards in Settings belong to Chess.com and are there for a private demo only.

Contact

Found a bug, or have an idea? Write to support@forkandknight.com.