Walking Through the Creation of a Chess Game in Python

Robert McMenemy
4 min readMar 30, 2024

Introduction

Chess, a game of infinite complexity and deep strategic depth, has been a subject of fascination for programmers for decades. The creation of a chess game involves understanding the rules of the game, graphical user interfaces (GUI), event handling, and data storage, among other things. In this article, we will delve into how a simple yet fully functional chess game was created using Python, touching on key programming concepts and dissecting the code to highlight its intricacies.

Concepts Explored

Chess Programming

Chess programming involves encoding the rules of chess, which include move generation, move validation, and the detection of special game conditions like check, checkmate, and stalemate. It also involves representing the chessboard and pieces in a way that a computer can understand and manipulate.

Graphical User Interface (GUI)

A GUI allows users to interact with the program in a visual and intuitive way. Tkinter, a Python binding to the Tk GUI toolkit, is used here to create a window, place elements like images and buttons, and handle user events like clicks and drags.

Event Handling

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