Built a free encyclopedia of all named chess openings (feedback wanted)
No ads, no accounts, just a hobby project.
For the past few months I've been building Chess Codex a free, no-signup encyclopedia of all 3,690 named chess openings indexed by Lichess (public-domain ECO data).
Live: https://test.av-webdevs.com/
The goal was to make a reference I personally wanted but couldn't find: something between Chess.com paywalled explorer and Lichess's search-focused explorer. Every opening gets its own page with:
-Interactive board - click through the moves or use arrow keys
-Live Lichess statistics - win rates and top responses for each position, pulled from real games, cached server-side
-Stockfish evaluation - cached from Lichess cloud analysis (slowly growing as I batch-fetch)
-Tree navigation - parent line, sibling variations, full subtree of every sub-line at all depths
-Play from here vs Stockfish at six difficulty levels (built on Stockfish.wasm, runs in your browser)
-Search by moves, name, or FEN (the FEN search finds transpositions - same position reached through different move orders)
It's a hobby project, written in vanilla PHP, hosted on shared OVH for 39 nok/month (€3). No ads, no tracking, no signup. Mobile-friendly + installable as a PWA.
Things I'm still working on:
-Human-written descriptions (currently 25 done, 3,665 to go - there's a "Suggest an improvement" form if you want to contribute one for your favourite line)
-Translations of opening names to UK/DE/FR
-Engine evaluations for deeper variations (Lichess only caches popularpositions)
Would love feedback - especially on UX (mobile in particular), missing
features, or openings I should prioritise for hand-written descriptions.