sreekar-voleti / chess-art

Program to generate PGN plots from chess games

Chess Art

Concept

This code uses a chess game's Portable Game Notation (PGN) to produce move-diagrams as shown below (produced from Viswanathan Anand's 1997 brilliancy against Joel Lautier in Biel):

It is written in Python 3, using the chess package.

Prerequisites and Installation

You need Python's chess package, so before running the scripts in this repository, make sure to type in any of the following commands in your command line/powershell:

pip install chess

pip3 install chess

Unfortunately, this package is not part of Anaconda's registry of packages so conda won't work here.

After you have the chess package set up, clone this repository into a directory of your choice using

git clone https://github.com/sreekar-voleti/chess-art.git

Usage

1. Download the PGN (.pgn file) for any game you want to turn into art (I have only tried this with games from lichess and chess.com but in principle any valid PGN file should work), and place it in the chess-art/PGNFiles/ directory.

2. Go into inputs.py and change the file_name to the name of the PGN file (just the name of the file, no need for any directory specification), and set the white_colour, black_colour and background_colour to colours of your choice from this list.

3. Run chessplot.py from the command line using either of the following

   python chessplot.py

   python3 chessplot.py

   The .png file containing the image should appear in the chess-art/ImageFiles/ directory.

4. Show your friends this cool new PGN art at the bar and the library!