Blitz Tactics

A free and open-source website for playing fast-paced chess puzzles!

If you want to play random puzzles each time:

• Three - three minutes, three lives, three hints.
• Haste - correct moves gain time, mistakes lose time.

These puzzles change daily:

• Countdown - solve puzzles before time runs out
• Speedrun - solve puzzles as quickly as you can

For more ways to play:

• Repetition - solve every puzzle quickly and precisely to unlock the next level
• Infinity - play through endless puzzles and set your own difficulty

Development

The backend uses Rails 6, Ruby 2.7.3, and Node 12.x LTS. Postgres 9 is used for the database. Chess puzzle data is imported into the database from JSON data files.

The frontend uses a modified version of Chessground for the interactive chessboard and chess.js for chess logic. User interfaces are implemented with Vue 3 and some legacy Backbone.js code. Webpack 4 and Sprockets 4 are both used for asset compilation.

Development instructions

First make sure your dev environment is set up for Ruby and Typescript development. You'll need Yarn and maybe a Ruby version manager like chruby or RVM. Then from within your git clone of the codebase, these steps will get you a dev environment with the chess puzzles used on the site:

bundle install    # install ruby gems
yarn install      # install node_modules

rails db:create   # set up an empty postgres db: blitz-tactics_development
rails db:migrate  # sets up the db schema

yarn lichess:puzzles:fetch   # downloads ~125k lichess v1 puzzles as JSON files
yarn lichess:puzzles:import  # import puzzles from JSON into the db (15+ min)
yarn lichess:puzzles:check   # should confirm the puzzles were loaded

yarn blitz:game_modes:fetch  # downloads puzzles used on blitztactics.com as JSON files
yarn blitz:game_modes:import # imports game modes puzzles into the db (6+ min)
yarn blitz:game_modes:check  # prints the number of puzzles in the db for each game mode

• Run a rails dev server: rails s
• Run a webpack dev server: yarn dev or ./bin/webpack-dev-server

Go to http://localhost:3000/ and you'll see the Blitz Tactics homepage if all went well.

Special thanks

• Stepmania - inspiration for the original game mechanics
• lichess - tactics puzzles and awesome community's feedback