Daily Chess

The date fixes the session contract, not your moves

Daily Chess is different from a fixed tactical puzzle. Every date begins from the normal chess opening position, but the date determines whether you play White or Black and provides the deterministic seed used when the browser-local computer has equally rated choices. Your decisions still branch the game naturally, so two players can reach different positions while sharing the same date identity.

Returning to the date restores the exact game

The browser-local autosave keeps the board, side to move, castling rights, en-passant target, halfmove counter, repetition map, move history, player color and Clean or Assisted status. Opening the same Daily date therefore resumes the saved position rather than replacing it with a fresh game. A date with no save starts from the standard opening under that date’s stable color and AI seed.

Complete rules stay active in Daily mode

Daily Chess uses the same legal-move engine as unlimited Practice. Check must be answered. A pinned piece cannot expose its own king. Castling requires clear and safe transit squares. En passant exists only on the immediate reply. Promotion offers four piece choices. Checkmate, stalemate, insufficient material, repetition and the 50-move counter all finish through the same game-status function.

The computer does not receive a hidden Daily advantage

Chess is a perfect-information game, so the local computer sees the same public pieces and state that you do. The date seed only resolves deterministic tie breaks in its evaluator. It does not alter legal moves, add hidden pieces or inspect future random events. Changing Easy, Standard or Hard changes search quality while preserving the same rules.

White and Black both appear across dates

The date hashes to a player color so the Daily habit does not teach only first-move play. On a White date you move first; on a Black date the computer makes the opening move before your first decision. Orientation follows your assigned color so your pieces remain closest to you on screen.

Daily history tracks completion honestly

A finished date records whether the result was a win, loss or draw, whether a player win was Clean, how many plies were played and which color you had. The specialist streak measures consecutive Daily Chess dates completed, not consecutive wins. That avoids turning a difficult loss into a reason to abandon the habit.

Hint and Undo remain clearly Assisted

Hint asks the strongest local evaluator for one candidate move and highlights its starting square. Undo returns to the position before your previous move, including the computer reply that followed it. Both actions mark the game Assisted because they reveal information that was not available during the original decision. Restart does the same.

The Daily does not create a global rating

There is no opponent pool, account ladder or population percentile behind the page. Local wins, draws, Clean wins and streaks describe only this browser’s own history. AI difficulty labels are product settings rather than Elo ratings. That keeps the feedback understandable and avoids inventing a competitive measurement the site cannot verify.

Today’s 6 remains frozen and separate

Chess is a specialist Practice catalog game. Its Daily history lives under Chess statistics and does not write a Chess result into the main `days` state. It never occupies one of the six main Daily slots. Cumulative release QA explicitly checks that Chess and the other specialist additions do not enter the frozen 2026 lineup.

Use Practice for unlimited games

Daily Chess is intentionally one stable session per date. Practice Game creates a seeded session that can be refreshed and resumed, while Fresh Practice creates another seed. Match to 3 carries game points across a longer local session. All three modes share the same rules, board and computer evaluator.

Promotion choices remain available on touch screens

Before moving a pawn onto its last rank, choose Queen, Rook, Bishop or Knight from the Promotion control. When the destination has several legal promotion moves, the interface selects the chosen one. This keeps underpromotion possible without requiring a separate modal that can cover the board on a small phone.

Daily Chess remains entirely browser-local

No account or remote game server is required. The local versioned store carries the specialist state forward from the previous canonical release while leaving the previous serialized store unchanged. The game can therefore be QA-tested, migrated and replayed without a paid API or external chess service.