skin: built-in
offline
White to move Pass & play
Promote to

Opponent

Move notes

Moves

No moves yet.

Captured

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How it works

One player creates a room and reads out the 5-character code. Moves sync through a Firebase Realtime Database, and the room also carries the skin, so both players see the same Scratch art.

Connection

Rooms live under /scratchchess. The database rules need read and write access on that path.

Load a Scratch project

Or load a project file

Drop an .sb3 here, or tap to pick one

Reads the costumes straight out of the file, so it works before a project is shared and needs no connection. In Scratch: File → Save to your computer.

Sprites found

Fit

Loader

Scratch refuses requests coming straight from a browser, so project IDs are read through a small Cloudflare Worker. Skins loaded from a file work without it, but only ID-loaded skins can sync to an opponent.

Load a game

Notes

Comments, variations and annotation marks are skipped, so an annotated PGN from a database or app still loads. The board keeps whatever skin you have on, and the arrow keys step through once a game is loaded.

Any shared Scratch project can be a chess set. scratchchess reads the project, finds sprites with these names, and uses each sprite's current costume as the artwork. Nothing else in the project matters — blocks, sounds, and extra sprites are ignored.

Required sprite names

White King Black King White Queen Black Queen White Rook Black Rook White Bishop Black Bishop White Knight Black Knight White Pawn Black Pawn Board

Optional

Highlight the two squares of the last move Move where a picked-up piece can go Capture the same, when a piece can be taken Select the square you tapped Check the king's square when in check

Leave any of these out and the built-in amber marker is used instead. Draw them mostly transparent — a ring or corner marks rather than a filled square — since they sit on top of the board and under the pieces. If you supply Move but not Capture, the Move art covers both.

Matching rules

Names are matched loosely: case, spacing, and word order are all flexible, so white pawn, Pawn_White, and WhitePawn all land in the same slot. The costume selected in the editor is the one that gets used, so you can keep alternates on other costumes.

Art tips

Draw pieces roughly square and centered — each one is fitted into its square. The Board sprite is stretched across all 64 squares, so a plain 8×8 grid works best; if yours has a decorative frame, raise Board inset in the Skin tab until the pieces line up.

Starter project

This downloads a real .sb3 with all 13 sprites already named and drawn. Open it in Scratch, replace the costumes, share it, then paste the project ID into the Skin tab.