- Play with RetroShare friends and contacts: Challenge players from the chess player list or a RetroShare chat, with secure GXS tunnels for identity-based games.
- Player profiles and presence: Choose your chess identity, manage contacts, and see who is available, playing, busy, or offline.
- Open challenges: Advertise that you are looking for a game with your preferred time control.
- Flexible time controls: Play unlimited games or timed games with a per-move increment.
- Chess rules and game controls: Legal move validation, castling, en passant, pawn promotion, checkmate, stalemate, draw offers and claims, and resignation.
- Interactive board: Click or drag pieces to move, with legal move hints, last-move highlighting, check indicators, and a move list with piece icons.
- Customizable appearance and sounds: Choose board themes and piece sets, flip the board, and configure sounds.
- Live spectating: Watch ongoing games and see the spectators connected through you.
- Game history and replay: Save completed games and review them move by move.
- PGN export: Export games for use in external chess tools.
- Glicko-2 ratings and leaderboard: Track player ratings with provisional status and rating reliability information.
- Decentralized result verification: Exchange signed game receipts and synchronize results between peers without a central leaderboard server.
- Standalone board debugger: Load FEN positions and test chess rules without running RetroShare or connecting another player.
put/clone RetroChess to RetroShare/plugins/ recommend
cd ${YOUR_DIR}/RetroShare/plugins/RetroChess/
qmake
make
sudo apt install libqt6svg6
Copy your RetroChess.dll to Data/extensions6 (Windows). libRetroChess.a to ./retroshare/extensions6 (Linux).
Then restart your RetroShare. You'll see a chess logo in your chat dialog's tool-bar or home's tool-bar.
After installing and restarting RetroShare:
- Click the RetroChess icon in the main RetroShare navigation sidebar or home toolbar.
- You can also launch chess games directly from any RetroShare chat dialog toolbar.
The plugin provides the dedicated tabs:
- Managing Contacts: Add players by their GXS ID or import them from your RetroShare contacts list. Past opponents are automatically remembered. Removing a chess contact does not remove the underlying RetroShare contact.
- Online Presence & Status:
- 🟢 Available: Online and ready to play. Right-click or click Invite to send a game challenge.
- 🔵 Playing: Currently playing another chess match.
- 🟠 Busy: Online, but has set their status to busy.
- ⚪ Offline / Unreachable: Offline contact.
- Chess Profile: Click the Chess profile button to select your active identity for chess games. Check the Busy box if you wish to temporarily decline new game invites.
- Live Match Features:
- Figurine chess notation with piece vector icons in the moves list table.
- Move highlighting (last moves, legal move hints, and check indicators).
- Customizable board themes, piece sets, board flip, and sounds in Settings (gear icon).
- Game History Tab:
- Automatically saves every finished game with opponent results, and timestamps.
- Review: Step forwards and backwards through moves in completed games.
- Export PGN: Export games to standard Portable Game Notation (.pgn) for replay and analysis in external chess engines and tools.
- Glicko-2 Rating System:
- Every player starts with a base rating of 1500 (Rating Deviation: 350, Volatility: 0.06).
- Players remain Provisional until completing at least 10 games with an RD at or below 110.
- Hovering over the Rating or RD column displays detailed tooltips explaining rating reliability and games played.
- Decentralized Verification:
- Completed GXS games exchange cryptographically signed receipts between players over secure GXS tunnels.
- Receipts synchronize automatically between players and connected peers (gossip sync) without central servers.
- Conflicting claims are safely excluded, and duplicate receipts cannot count twice.
RetroChess includes a small standalone Qt application for reproducing and
debugging chess-rule problems without starting RetroShare, creating a tunnel,
or connecting a second player. It uses the same ChessBoard input widget and
ChessPosition rules/state class as the plugin game window.
The debugger supports:
- Click-to-move and drag-and-drop moves.
- Loading and copying complete FEN positions.
- Resetting to the initial position.
- Testing legal moves, castling, en-passant and promotion.
- A timestamped log of accepted and rejected moves.
- A deterministic SHA-256 hash for comparing positions.
cd plugins/RetroChess/debug
qmake
make Start the debugger with:
./release/RetroChessBoardDebug.exeThe debugger is independent of the RetroShare services and does not send moves over the network. To reproduce a reported problem, copy the FEN from a game/debug report, paste it into the FEN position field, select Load FEN, and play the move that caused the issue. The event log records the result and the resulting position hash.
The standalone debugger is an additional development tool. It does not replace or disable invitations, network games, game history, or the normal RetroChess game window.
based on: https://github.com/Texas-C/RetroChess
based on: https://github.com/chozabu/RetroChess