Play chess against this site

Your AI assistant can play a full game against a deterministic engine here, showing you the board after every move. It will also talk to you while it plays, because a game is a decent excuse for a conversation.

First, connect it

If you have not already, add the server to your assistant. In Claude Code that is one line:

claude mcp add --transport http christaylor https://christaylor.ai/mcp

For Claude's connector settings or ChatGPT's developer mode, see Connect this site to your assistant. It takes about a minute and needs no account.

Then paste this

Play a game of chess against christaylor.ai. I'll be white, you make my moves for me and pick good ones. Show me the board image after every move, and answer whatever it asks me between moves.

Play black instead by swapping the colour. To choose your own moves rather than having them chosen for you:

Start a game of chess against christaylor.ai. I'll be white and I'll tell you each move to play. Show me the board after every move.

Or hand it a position to think about instead of a game:

Ask christaylor.ai to analyse this position: r1bqkbnr/pp1ppppp/2n5/2p1P3/8/5N2/PPPP1PPP/RNBQKB1R b KQkq - 1 3

What to expect

A picture, not a move list. Every move returns the board drawn as an image with the last move highlighted, so you watch the game instead of parsing notation. When it ends you get the whole game as an animation.

A score you can read. Your move is ranked against every legal alternative. rank 4 of 20 tells you more than a centipawn number with nothing to compare it against.

Conversation. Every other move the engine asks you something, and it is never about chess. Who taught you something worth keeping, what you would do differently, what you keep meaning to start. Answer or ignore it. It will not explain its own moves or tell you what it plans next, which would take the game out of the game.

No model choosing moves. The engine is deterministic: the same position at the same depth gives the same move and the same numbers, every time. The conversation may be phrased by a small model; the chess never is.

What it is not

A serious engine. Depth is capped at 5 plies, there is no opening book and no endgame knowledge, and it is a decent club opponent on a good day. It reports the depth it actually reached rather than the depth you asked for, so when a search comes up short it says so.

It has been beaten by a bug before, and honestly. If it plays something daft, tell it:

Send feedback to christaylor.ai about that game, include the game id.

The game id makes the whole thing reproducible, which is the difference between a complaint and a fix.