It's fast on the backend due to running on the JVM and being completely non-blocking (Scala + Akka + MongoDB)
Combined with a lightweight-ish frontend (Cordova build for native mobile) and, voila, impressive performance with a decent UI all while not having to maintain separate web, iOS, and Android apps.
Am I mistaken, or was it that lichess was actually in PHP a couple of years ago? I seem to remember that I was surprised to learn that it is Laravel+Vue. But maybe I'm mixing things up.
I’m a mational master, 2400 blitz/bullet player and full stack dev, and I support this message :-). LiChess is an incredible resource for the chess community.
I’m also building some software integrated with lichess to help people get good at chess, fast. Any chess hackers interested in contributing, please email me! Contact info is in my profile.
Indeed. Pity the culture is so... unfriendly? Rematches are basically non-existent - even in bullet! It's bizarre, and I have to assume it's going to limit the site's growth.
Yesterday I played a classical game vs an opponent rated higher than me and lost. Afterwards I analyzed the game in a lichess study, and my opponent was nice enough to share his thoughts in the study. It was an awesome experience. There are great parts of the community as well.
That's pretty cool, but it's probably best to think of classical as a whole different game/community that happens to be accessible from the same homepage.
I analyze every game, win or lose, so I often ignore the immediate rematch request. I accept more rematch requests on chess.com because... analysis is not free! Essentially the ease of use and free availability of high quality analysis tools on lichess outcompetes my desire for a quick rematch.
I have a theory on this. Is it possible that rematch is a very "American" thing? On chess.com where player nationality is shown in the interface I've noticed (I think) disproportionate rematch requests from American players if they lose. I am pretty relaxed and tend to accept such requests, but I never ask for rematches myself. So game theory allows a closely matched player to always beat me in a match by simply continuing to request rematches while they are behind on the match score. This actually happens quite often (anecdata I know). Summarising my theory is that rematch requests are often a reflexive response to a loss, but more so in America than Europe. Furthermore lichess tends to be a more European site, chess.com more an American site. Hence more rematches on chess.com than lichess. Just a theory.
I play at a pretty decent level and have played hundreds of games on lichess. They make it very easy to send a friendly comment to your opponent. For example there's a WP button that sends "Well played". Every time I am outplayed and well beaten I press that button. I have never once seen that message in my direction, despite "deserving" it (partly a subjective assessment admittedly) in perhaps 30 percent of the games I play. I find this .... disappointing.
Which is weird knowing that in Starcraft scene 'gg' is a residing note because there was no option in SC1 other than leaving the game. IIRC this is written in KeSPA rules.
I'm just a single data point, although I've seen others complain about it online. I would love it if the major sites would release stats on this. As frustrating as it can be, especially in bullet, I'm more curious than anything. If the phenomenon is real, it could hold some surprising lessons for how design affects user behavior.
I rematch with people all the time. I literally rematched with someone in my last game just a second ago playing 10/0. Are you the sort who refuses to resign even when you have a hopeless material disadvantage?
I have won a couple games after being down with a seemingly hopeless material disadvantage. I'm not a grandmaster, and they don't play me (I suppose they might to laugh at a bad player, but that is unlikely). Until you get to the very high levels you should not assume your opponent knows how to convert even an easy endgame.
> It is good etiquette to request a resignation in chat?
Not a chance. People at lower ratings screw up what should be wins all the time. Your opponent may be hoping for a stalemate or to run out the clock or waiting for you to blunder.
I love lichess website too. I used to play on fics server. Once I switched platforms for my computer, I could not find a good client for fics. lichess is easy to use and get some quick chess time everyday. I like their tourney format also. Easy to get in and out unlike other places where you cannot get in after it started.
Chess and Tetris are two of my favorite games. I've known about Lichess for quite a while and recently discovered jstris, which is a sort-of similar site for Tetris:
It's not quite as polished as Lichess and if you've never played Tetris with a keyboard before that may be a significant learning hurdle (though it's actually a very good control scheme for the game). But overall it's a really cool site. (There's also Tetris Friends, but I just always found the general style of the site very offputting.)
> if you've never played Tetris with a keyboard before
Wait, whaat?
Are there pointy-clicky interfaces to tetris nowadays? Well, of course there must be.. I think I last played tetris as the original version made by that Russian guy (or was it so long ago that it was a Soviet guy?) running on DOS.
I don't agree on the UX, the interface is _terrible_ in many ways:
1. I can't even scroll the page horizontally on Chrome.
2. There are 2 menus with a completely different interface.
3. The Android mobile app gives you a completely different experience, and I think there is no lobby, so I often pick a match from Chrome and then switch to the app (and of course the "Open in Mobile App" button doesn't work for me).
4. In general I find the UI is very confusing:
4a. There are 3 places where to write something about a match: your personal notes (never used this, I guess the value proposition here is that your notes will be stored along the match, but I don't think almost anybody cares about notes about games played last year for instance), the chat (which works only between the current 2 players, and you can't access it from the analysis page) and the spectators chat (I suppose this has a purpose for highly spectated matches and live commentary, but I could also run a separate browser where I'm not logged in and read that too so it sounds useless to me).
4b. The match history at the bottom of the chessboard is useless to me 99% of the times, as it's completely empty.
4c. Often the same information is displayed in different parts of the page, I already mentioned the menu problem, but also when playing you can see some infos about the players both on the left and the right column. All these things complicate the UI.
To close on a positive note the feature I like the most of lichess is probably the analysis page, super useful and well done.
I'm a designer by trade and I think Lichess is really well done. They've managed to pack a ton of features and have a game that works well for me on both mobile and web.
Certainly there are ways that it could be improved, but calling it "terrible" seems like a huge exaggeration to me and does practically warrant an illustrative alternative that would better suit the OP.
I've also never been of the belief that mobile and should have exactly the same interface specifically given the different restrictions of the mediums.
Agreed. It's a pretty good UI considering the complexity. My 7 year old frequents there and gets around without any problems or asking how to use the site.
> I'm a designer by trade and I think Lichess is really well done.
I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. If you asked designers about the state of mobile UIs about 12 years ago I think many would have praised them, then it came the iPhone and they vanished completely.
I've only mentioned very clear examples in my post, would you, as a designer, put 2 completely different menus (with basically the same functionalities), whose buttons are visible at the same time, on an app? Would you want to have the app scrollable if needed or not?
> I've also never been of the belief that mobile and should have exactly the same interface specifically given the different restrictions of the mediums.
Of course, currently lichess.org is doing the opposite by the way.
My complain was about the mobile app being a _completely_ different experience. i.e. there isn't the lobby, the first thing you see after you go to lichess' homepage.
That's just silly. One can have valid criticisms yet not know how to apply them. If I find a car's human interface intuitive, would you expect me to know how to manufacture a car's dashboard?
I'm not trying to make a different front-end for lichess but rather something similar to playok.com, from scratch, so it takes quite a bit of time. I haven't been working on the project for more than a year unfortunately, but so far:
- I've got the core UI framework mostly ready, unfortunately still undocumented but most components should be ready for production [1]
- Some core structures, like a Hierarchical State Machine implementation I made, should be good enough [2]
- I've implemented some games like tic-tac-toe and chess, but focusing mostly on the logic of the game rather than the UI or anything else really for now. I have a usable chessboard component but it's not really any good for production use.
- Database-wise pretty much everything still needs to be developed.
- The server/cloud infrastructure still needs to be developed.
- I still haven't quite figured out what the best way to push updates to the app is, given that you don't want to disrupt current games almost at all but you still want to push bug fixes to everyone.
Suprised to learn that. What can be the rationale for that? Honestly, it doesn't seem to make any sense, if you've already decided on how to proceed, it should be your right to do so (and your problem if you blunder).
This right here is why I prefer other chess sites for very fast play. Just watch some of Benjamin Finegold's stream/videos for an example of how this works.
Is it? I us chess.com, and parts of the Lichess interface seems quite primitive in comparison: The board doesn't resize to fit the screen, there's no live evaluation, and it just seems a bit less polished overall.
Unfortunately, lichess moderation and policies for account bans or forced periods of inactivity are horrendous.
I once got banned because my cell phone lost connectivity as I passed a subway tunnel and in the meantime the other user “reported” me for abandoning the game.
This resulted in my account being frozen out from playing games for several hours. I wrote to the support email address and got no response.
This then happened two or three more times in the same month.
Furious with the ridiculous policy, I only will play in “anonymous” mode now, usually at chess.com with frequently changed accounts, sometimes still at lichess with no registration.
Only several hours? Sorry, but you're being a drama queen. If you're riding a train through a tunnel, you shouldn't be playing on lichess. Stop ruining other players' experiences.
Your reply is quite rude. It is deeply unreasonable to suggest someone can’t play chess e.g. on their morning commute because other people are too whiny to accept that disconnections and move delays are simply a built-in reality of internet chess, period.
If your experience of internet chess can possibly be affected by intermittent disconnections or move delays by your opponent, then you are being the drama queen. That would be incredibly unreasonable.
Unfortunately legitimate connection problems resulting in abandoned games is the exception to the rule. But even a legitimate connection issue is still a major annoyance to your opponent. If this is happening to you on a regular basis that the bans are a problem for you, then the solution is to only play when you have a high degree of confidence that your connection won't drop.
I disagree. It’s internet chess and disconnections happen for all sorts of reasons. It’s totally backwards to have automated account bans for disconnections.
If you agree to play a game against someone, you are implicitly accepting that one thing they may do is become disconnected / idle. That’s simply unavoidable. You’re always free to resign and leave the game if you don’t prefer to wait around, but locking the other player out when there’s no evidence they did something malicious is horrible.
You're also agreeing to abide by the rules set forth of the organization you're playing under. I generally play 10-20 games a day, and a disconnect happens while I'm playing maybe once every couple of months. If you're disconnects are significantly higher than that, you're probably not the target market for on-line blitz chess.
Yes, but the rules govern intentionally abandoning games, not disconnections you may not have control over.
> “If you're disconnects are significantly higher than that, you're probably not the target market for on-line blitz chess.”
It’s not very common and it’s not predictable or uniform (not even in subway tunnels). But if someone reports you for disconnecting, it autonatically locks you out from playing and emailing to the support email gets no response to unlock in false positive cases.
Also, just in the basic rules of chess, your opponent can do whatever they want with their clock time. You’ve agreed to abide by that rule by agreeing to play. If they want to take 4:00 to think about their sixth move in a 5/0 game, they are perfectly allowed, and may even still win if you blunder.
There’s no time limit per move beyond the first move and the overall clock time. Disconnections (when the player might return) are no different.
>Also, just in the basic rules of chess, your opponent can do whatever they want with their clock time.
This is incorrect. At this point I'd like to point out that I was (and soon will be again) a USCF certified TD [1], and have run my own correspondence site for about 20 years [2]. Abandoning a game has the unique distinction of being mentioned three times in the USCF rulebook, and carries with it the most severe penalty specifically mentioned which is ejection from the tournament (with more severe penalties are up to the TD and USCF). FIDE has a similar rule, though they don't mention abandoment directly where a player has stopped trying to win under the "normal means". Not all rule violations have to be intentional, specifically similar to your case is "annoying behavior". When you fail to finish a game, for whatever reason, it's annoying and an inconvenience to your opponent, and some punitive measure is warranted.
Unfortunately it's much more common for a player to leave from a losing position without resigning. It's hard to solve that problem without hurting commuters in the crossfire. I also play on the subway, but I stick to correspondence or classical depending on where I am. I usually have 10-15 correspondence games open, and long format is an amazing way to improve your game without worrying about time sensitive connection issues.
Given that the lockout policy only applies on actual accounts (someone signed up a username), I don’t see why it would be hard. If an account disconnects intermittently, the history of that would be obvious compared with someone who is disconnecting all the time because they are frustrated at losing. My whole comment is just that it doesn’t seem like lichess is even trying to differentiate at all, and failing that, they don’t respond or unlock accounts if you write to them about it either. There is so much super low-hanging fruit they could do to make the policy better, but just don’t.
Separately from this, I personally actually think it’s totally backwards and unreasonable to ever, for any reason, care that an opponent disconnects. I don’t care at all if my opponent disconnects for any reason, whether because they are frustrated, their cell connection dropped, whatever. They have zero obligation to move fast, resign from losing positions, or anything else. It is internet chess with literally nothing riding on it, ever, for anyone.
If you click to play a game of length X minutes or whatever, that’s your commitment. It’s not your opponent’s. They might waste X-1 minutes looking at cat pictures before playing a move— that’s well within their rights and you agreed to play, meaning you can quit or disconnect if you don’t wanna wait around for the next move, or you can cede that your opponent can do whatever they want with their allocated clock time, whether that is resigning, disconnecting, or playing nonsense moves, or playing for real.
I think all the frustration that an opponent can degrade your experience by using their clock time to do whatever they want is unreasonable. That’s on you, not on the system or the opponent.
Especially in longer time controls, it is plain rude to "resign" from a losing position by timing out instead of resigning. I get that this does not apply to your case, but it's unusual to try and find that mate in 10 by disconnecting.
Isn’t it possible to play in “email” mode (read: days long time control) or something else if you’re going to be in a situation with spotty coverage? As I understand it, live games mean just that.
A few hours ban is a slap on the wrist from a moderation perspective, and it seems... odd... that they’d even hit you with that unless you regularly leave games.
I have a little bit of experience with lichess and as far as i can tell, their treating of abusers is typically rather deliberate.
Maybe you should start considering their usage policy.
This is just false. Lockouts from playing due to disconnections happen automatically, whether the disconnection happened through no fault of your own or not.
The lead developer of Lichess, Thibault Duplessis, gave an excellent talk the other year if you're interested in the story behind Lichess. [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHP5AdRlRNY