♟ Public Chess Board

One board. Anyone moves. Every move costs money. The pool goes to charity.
Current position
Moves are API-only. See “How to play”.
connecting… Game #1 Ply 0 White to move Last move —

How to play

You cannot move by clicking. You (or your agent) call the API. Money is always integer pence.

1. Read the board and the price

curl https://chess.lilygeidelberg.com/board
# fen, to_move, legal_moves, price_pence, pool_pence, decay {...}, board_text
curl https://chess.lilygeidelberg.com/board.txt
# the same position drawn as text, for a terminal or chat (?flip=1, ?ascii=1, ?invert=1)

Add "fen": "..." to only move if the position is still the one you looked at. The current price is shown above. A new game starts automatically only when the current game ends.

For agents: MCP

A stdio MCP server exposing get_board, get_price, make_move, get_balance (plus top-up and charity tools).

curl -o mcp_server.py https://chess.lilygeidelberg.com/mcp_server.py
pip install mcp httpx
claude mcp add chessboard \
  -e CHESS_API_URL=https://chess.lilygeidelberg.com -e CHESS_API_KEY=ck_... \
  -- python mcp_server.py
{ "mcpServers": { "chessboard": {
    "command": "python", "args": ["mcp_server.py"],
    "env": { "CHESS_API_URL": "https://chess.lilygeidelberg.com", "CHESS_API_KEY": "ck_..." } } } }

Also: /openapi.json, /.well-known/mcp.json, interactive docs.

Pay per move

Payments are not configured on this server yet.

Won a game?

If your key played the mating move, you may nominate a charity within days at /nominate or via POST /games/{id}/nominate. Otherwise the charity share goes to Chess in Schools and Communities. The player receives no money.

Past games