Introducing ChessHeat

7/27/2026 6:27 am | Share to:

Introducing my latest project to fiddle with. This is "ChessHeat." It is an app to play chess in against an engine. I'm using StockFish, though my own chess engine is a future project because why not.

ChessHeat though is a Python graphical interface for playing chess against another engine with one central core feature that others don't have (at least, not that I've seen.) The heatmap you can see on the board.

The intensity of the red represents how often a square is coming up in the lines the engine is analyzing. You may also notice some square's aren't entirely of their color, and that is to represent how immediate the engine is looking at that square. If the square is fully that color that means the focus is on it in the next move or two.

I am not yet convinced how helpful this is, but it is interesting. The system records the heatmap per move, so you can go back and see how the heatmap changes after every move.

I have a few other ideas I am exploring, which are things like "critical move" notifications. This is when the machine finds that you have only one good move and everything else is bad. I am still getting this feature right, but the idea here is that it stops and notifies you about this being a critical move, letting you pause and think more about it.

Some would argue this is bad or cheating, whatever.

The entire goal of this project is to improve how someone can learn from playing against an engine. And the critical move idea is one that, to me, helps me tap into the 'chess puzzle' thinking. Which, good players will argue should always be on, especially when your moves are untimed. And they'd be right, but I am not a great chess player. I'm a mediocre slightly above average chess player.

I've got a few more ideas of things to add to it, but we'll see how they go before I share them. But here's ChessHeat, another of my recent spate of projects to fiddle with in the evenings.