offline-chess-puzzles

A simple tool to view and solve puzzles from the lichess puzzle database.

I need to give a big thank you to lichess for creating the puzzle database, the project chess-engine which I used as a starting point for the GUI here, and the awesome Iced GUI library in which the interface is made.

Usage:

Download the app from either: - The releases page - The latest build artifacts from the main branch (click on the most recent successful workflow run, then scroll down to the "Artifacts" section)

The app can download and extract the puzzles database automatically if you have an internet connection, but if you don't, you can manually extract and copy the database file ("lichess_db_puzzle.csv" from the lichess link above) to the "puzzles" directory.

To play you simply adjust the search to your needs, press "search" and a puzzle will be loaded, when you get it right, the next one will be immediatly displayed (you can disable this auto load in the settings).

If the move is a promotion you need to select the piece to promote to (in the search tab) before moving the pawn.

The search is a bit slow (especially when searching by opening, because it often needs to traverse the whole database) but I think it's important to use the cvs directly so users can easily replace the file if needed.

Building and Running from Source

To build and run this project from source, you'll need to have Rust and Cargo installed. You can find instructions on how to install them at rust-lang.org.

Once you have Rust and Cargo installed, you can clone this repository and run the project with the following command:

cargo run --release

Running on Linux

If you are on Linux and the application fails to launch, you might need to use the Open GL or software renderer to draw the window. Try running the application with either of the following commands: WGPU_BACKEND="gl" cargo run --release (Open GL) or ICED_BACKEND="tiny-skia" cargo run --release (Software)

Possible use cases:

• Practice offline, it has filters by puzzle rating, theme and opening.
• Teach the tactical motifs to students, since it's simple to select easy puzzles from a theme (it lack arrows, but there's an analysis function)
• Setting a very small search limit might be useful for those who want to practice by repetition (you'll get the same puzzles each time, in random order). But there's no build-in functionality specific for this yet.

Are you using this app? I'd be very interested in knowing what's your use case and if there's any other feature that would be useful. Feel free to start a conversation in discussions (for general feedback/ideas) or to create an issue (to report bugs or specific feature requests).

I can't promise anything though, since this is just a hobby project (and the goal is to keep the app simple).

Features

• All the filters we have in Lichess (except a few minor opening variations), plus rating range
• Flip the board to solve from the opponent's perspective (to practice seeing what is being threatened against us)
• A few piece themes and a bunch of board themes
• Analysis board (with basic engine support)
• Hint (see which piece to move)
• Settings are remembered and loaded when you open the app again
• Navigate to the previous/next puzzles
• Favorite puzzles and search those favorites
• Export part of the search to PDF
• Save puzzle as a .jpg file

License:

• The code is distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.

Assets authors / licenses:

• The piece set "cburnett" is a work of Colin M.L. Burnett and used under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 unported license (more info on the license.txt file in that directory).
• The "california" piece set is a work of Jerry S. licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (https://sites.google.com/view/jerrychess/home)
• The piece sets "Cardinal", "Dubrovny", "Gioco", "Icpieces", "Maestro", "Staunty", "Governor" and "Tatiana" are work of "sadsnake1", licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. And obtained from the lila (lichess) repository.
• The piece set and font "Chess Alpha" is a work of Eric Bentzen and free for personal non commercial use. Full info in the documents in the "font" directory.
• The original Merida chess font is a work of Armando Hernandez Marroquin and distributed as 'freeware' and the shaded version used here and obtained from the lichess repository is a work of Felix Kling ("DeepKling" here on github).