♟️ Velvet Chess Engine

Velvet Chess Engine is a UCI chess engine written in Rust.

Version 7.0.0 is currently ranked around 3580 Elo (Blitz) and 3485 Elo (40/15) in the Computer Chess Rating Lists (CCRL):

• CCRL Blitz
• CCRL 40/15

In Fischer Random Chess, the single-threaded rating is around 3750 Elo:

• CCRL 40/2 FRC

In order to play against Velvet, you need a Chess GUI with support for the UCI protocol.

Starting with v3.3.0 Velvet also supports the Fischer Random Chess (Chess960) variant. This requires a Chess GUI/UCI client which supports the Chess960 extension as described in the UCI specification.

v4.0.1 also added support for DFRC ("Double Fischer Random Chess").

📥 Download

Executables for Windows, macOS and Linux can be downloaded from the releases page.

💻 Manual compilation

Since Velvet is written in Rust, a manual compilation requires the installation of the Rust tool chain (e.g. using rustup). The installed Rust version must support the Rust 2021 Edition (i.e. v1.56 and upwards).

Then you can compile the engine using cargo:

cargo build --release --bin velvet

To compile the engine without Syzygy tablebase support (e.g. when the target architecture is not supported by the Fathom library), you can pass the no-default-features flag:

cargo build --no-default-features --release --bin velvet

📜 License

This project is licensed under the GNU General Public License - see the LICENSE for details.

🎉 Acknowledgements

• The Chess Programming Wiki (CPW) has excellent articles and descriptions
• A big thanks to all the chess engine testers out there