• lichess.org will always be free.
• lichess.org will never contain advertisements.
• lichess.org will always be open-source.

The purpose of Lichess is to provide a minimalist chess game. It requires no registration: you don't need to create an account. It requires no ActiveX controls (e.g. Flash, Java), and can be run from any modern web browser.

Lichess provides the following:

• Two-player games between humans
• Single-player (versus the artificial intelligence, Crafty)
• Time controls for chess clocks, including Fischer time settings
• White- and Black-player randomization upon request
• Complete list of checkmates in games played on Lichess
• Public Lichess player searching and online members page
• Active Lichess games monitor
• Global statistics and charts for ratings history and game ends
• Optional username-and-password registration
• Option for users to close their accounts
• User-defined restriction of who can join games, based on player rating
• Rated player account statistics (e.g. rank, history, win ratios)
• Chess960, also known as Fischer Random, chess variant
• Premoves
• moretime()
• Castling, en passant, and pawn promotion and under-promotion
• Detection of check, checkmate, and stalemate
• Resignation and draw offers
• Ability to abort uninitiated games or force resignation
• Threefold repetition draw recording (must be claimed by player)
• Automatic draw detection by 50-move draw rule
• Automatic draw detection of insufficient mate material
• Integrated chat
• Visual move validation while choosing destination squares
• Game replay and analysis
• Spectator mode
• Per-game export in portable game notation
• Database export of any player's games as comma-separated values (CSV)
• Translated to fifty-seven languages
• Basic chess set color themes switching
• Works in any Internet browser (except IE6/IE7), with no Flash or plugins

More features are always being considered!

Lichess is open-source. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

It means you may read, modify, use and redistribute the code. You may NOT use it for commercial purposes. You may NOT display ads on a page where Lichess is displayed.

View or download the source code using the Lichess repository on GitHub.

Lichess is built using only open-source software, including:

• PHP 5.3 with Symfony2
• JavaScript with jQuery
• HTML5 with CSS
• Arch Linux
• nginx
• Vim
• Crafty
• pgn4web

Lichess works best with modern Internet browsers like Mozilla FireFox, Google Chrome, Safari, or Opera.

Want to improve the FAQ? The Wiki is referenced from here: https://github.com/ornicar/lichess/wiki/_pages.