A workbench for chess ideas
Most chess software is built around playing games. Chess Labs is built around the hour afterwards — walking the moves back, branching into the line you should have played, writing down why, and handing the result to someone else.
What it is
A board you enter moves on
Drag pieces or type moves in SAN or UCI. Only legal moves are accepted, and promotion, castling, en passant, check and mate all behave the way they should.
A study, not a game record
A saved study keeps the whole tree: the main line, unlimited variations, comments and NAGs, plus the metadata — event, site, date, round, players, result, ECO.
Sharing that you control
Keep a study private, publish it at an unguessable link, or invite one person by email as a viewer or a collaborator. Nothing is public until you make it so.
What it is not
Not a playing server
There are no clocks, no pairings and no opponents. If you want to play a game, play it elsewhere and bring the PGN here to work through it.
Not a rating tracker
Chess Labs stores no rating history and draws no rating graphs. Importing a game from Lichess pulls the moves, and only the moves.
Not a lock-in
A study is stored as PGN — the same text every other chess program reads. Export a single study or a whole collection whenever you like.
Built on open chess libraries
The board is Lichess's Chessground renderer and the rules come from chessops, both consumed as published packages under their own licences. Games round-trip as standard PGN, so the same study opens in Lichess, SCID, ChessBase or any other tool that reads the format.
Questions? Get in touch