Chess Esca

esca

Esca is the anglerfish's lure — the light that shows what is really on the board.

Rust/Python MIT chess library: rules, facts, explanations, PGN, opening books and names, UCI client, and an MCP server over it; one API, Chess960 throughout.

Position is placement and state and nothing else. Rules live in Variant implementations — Classic and Chess960 — so a position answers a rules question by taking the variant that defines it, and a new variant is a new implementation and nothing else. A Game pairs a variant with the moves played, which is what repetition and claimable draws need. Facts answers what is true about one position — 221 named facts in 14 groups — and annotated_moves() answers what each of its legal moves does, with 27 more. Every fact is typed, named after what a player would call it, and told about White and Black by name.

Rust

[dependencies]
esca = "0.4"

use esca::{Colour, Game, classic};

let mut game = Game::new(classic());   // Chess960 rules: `esca::chess960()`
game.play_san("e4").unwrap();
game.play_uci("e7e5").unwrap();
println!("{}", game.position().fen());

let facts = game.facts();
println!("{}", facts.tactics.legal_move_count.white);
println!("{:?}", facts.pawns.passed.of(Colour::Black).files());
println!("{}", facts.summary());

Cargo features, none on by default: lichess (streaming reader for the Lichess evaluation dump), pgn (reading and writing games as PGN), polyglot (opening books), openings (the bundled ECO catalogue), serde (the one JSON form of the facts, and the JSON Schema for it), tensors (a run of positions as one typed array per fact) and python (the PyO3 module the wheel is built from). Position::polyglot_key needs no feature.

Python

pip install esca

import esca

game = esca.Game()  # Chess960 rules: esca.Game(variant=esca.CHESS960)
game.play_san("e4")
game.play("e7e5")
print(game.position.fen)

facts = game.facts()
print(facts.tactics.legal_move_count.white)
print(list(facts.pawns.passed.black.files))
print(facts.to_dict()["material"])  # every group in the one JSON form

Wheels are abi3 for Python 3.12 and up. pip install esca[tensors] adds NumPy and esca.tensors, which turns a run of positions into one typed array per fact.

Examples

Three short programs a side, reading the same examples/games.pgn, in examples/ and python/examples/:

• pgn_report / read_games.py — per game of a PGN file: opening, final position, ending, passers.
• why_illegal / legal_moves.py — every legal move and what it does, then why one other is not.
• engine_game / engine_game.py — a UCI engine against itself, its ending as English, JSON and arrays. Takes the engine's path; without one it says so and stops.

What it covers

• Classic chess and Chess960, behind one Variant trait.
• FEN and EPD, reading KQkq and the AHah of X-FEN and Shredder-FEN alike, and writing KQkq whenever the rook files allow it.
• Legal move generation into a MoveList that never allocates.
• UCI move text in either castling spelling, and SAN with the disambiguation it needs.
• Checkmate, stalemate, insufficient material, the fifty- and seventy-five-move rules, and threefold and fivefold repetition.
• Facts: fourteen groups of cheap facts about one position — the board itself, game state, history, material, pawns, pieces, king, mobility, attacks, exchanges, threats, one-ply tactics, endgame and the attack maps side by side — and MoveFacts for every legal move, from annotated_moves(). Every value that differs between the two sides is a ByColour, read as .white, .black or .of(colour).
• A catalogue of those facts as data — name, type, dtype, shape and meaning — which docs/features.md, docs/facts.schema.json, the Python type stubs and the tensor layout are all generated from, and which the MCP server serves.
• One JSON form for the facts, written by Rust's serde::Serialize and by Python's to_dict(), byte for byte the same and described by docs/facts.schema.json.
• A typed tensor export: one array per fact, batch first, each keeping the width and sign it was declared with — nothing scaled, normalised or cast to a float — expanded or bit-packed, and written as safetensors.
• Polyglot opening books: the format's own key on every Position, books read, drawn from and built, and an ECO code and name for some 3,800 named positions.
• Named endings with theory verdicts and technique names, and a one-line English describe() beside every value the explanations layer answers with.

MCP server

mcp/ is a second distribution from this repository: chess-esca-mcp, an MCP server that hands esca's answers to an LLM as JSON — the whole state of a position, whether a move is legal and every reason it is not, the named facts, the ECO name, opening-book moves, and PGN read and written. It carries no engine and does no search. It runs as uvx chess-esca-mcp, is versioned with the library and pins the matching esca, and is documented in mcp/README.md.

Documentation

• docs/esca-api.md — the API in both languages; §11 is the whole Python surface.
• docs/features.md — every fact, its type and its meaning, group by group.
• docs/esca-vocabulary.md — the terms the API and the facts are named after.

Related projects

• AnglerfishChess/anglerfish — the chess engine that plays from a learned evaluation, and the Python trainer that produces it. Both are built on esca; the trainer turns its facts into the rows a net eats.
• AnglerfishChess/uci-test-suite — a conformance suite that checks a program is a valid UCI engine, whatever its strength. It talks to the engine under test through esca's UCI client.
• AnglerfishChess/chess-uci-mcp — an MCP server that drives UCI engines from an LLM, so an esca position can be handed to Stockfish for a number and a line to go with the facts esca reads off it.
• AnglerfishChess/plugins — the agent-plugin marketplace, where chess-esca-mcp ships with a skill that teaches an agent which of its tools answers which question.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.

Acknowledgements

• cozy-chess (MIT) — the move generator esca stands on.
• Lichess — the evaluation dump the lichess reader streams, the game database, and lichess-org/chess-openings, whose opening names the openings feature bundles (CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication).
• The Polyglot opening-book format and its key scheme, by Fabien Letouzey; the key constants are those published in polyglot-book-rs (MIT OR Apache-2.0).
• Stockfish and Leela Chess Zero, the engines the UCI client is tested against.