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Play without blunders. See the board. Spot the threats. Plan attacks. Love chess but hate missing the obvious? Put visual intuition to work alongside analysis. Chess Visualizer is an educational tool that reveals the structure of a position at a glance: critical, weak, and contested squares—and how pieces attack, support, and constrain one another. Key features: - Attack rays and a heatmap. - Fully customizable visualization - colors and geometry. - Play online with a friend. Open source / MIT.
I’m still pretty new to chess, and whenever I play with my kids, I keep overlooking things and making blunders. But after watching some chess streams, I realized that even International Masters—people who have been playing chess for almost their entire lives—still blunder. So I’d been dreaming about a visualizer like this for a long time.
The idea sounds simple: visually show the attacks of every piece. But even my earliest attempts revealed a problem. Once all those little lines started crossing and overlapping, it became impossible to make out what was happening on the board. The whole picture was simply unreadable.
So I started experimenting with displaying attacks as rays and coloring the backgrounds of the squares according to each side’s attack strength—a kind of heatmap. Eventually, I found a setup where the visualization actually helps instead of getting in the way. It turned out that combining attack rays with square highlighting works pretty well, as long as the attack colors of both sides are blended in the right way.
Getting the geometry and colors of the attacks right required a lot of thought, experimentation, and fine-tuning. But when I play using the visualizer, it has helped me reduce the number of blunders to almost zero.
Try experimenting with your own way of seeing the board—maybe you can achieve similar results too. And if you discover a better way to visualize a position, please share your findings—it could help other players as well. The project is open source and released under the MIT License.
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About Chess Visualizer on Product Hunt
“#chess #visualization #education #boardgames”
Chess Visualizer was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 2 upvotes and 1 comments, placing #153 on the daily leaderboard. Play without blunders. See the board. Spot the threats. Plan attacks. Love chess but hate missing the obvious? Put visual intuition to work alongside analysis. Chess Visualizer is an educational tool that reveals the structure of a position at a glance: critical, weak, and contested squares—and how pieces attack, support, and constrain one another. Key features: - Attack rays and a heatmap. - Fully customizable visualization - colors and geometry. - Play online with a friend. Open source / MIT.
Chess Visualizer was featured in Board Games (5.4k followers), GitHub (41.4k followers), Games (98.9k followers) and Data Visualization (3.6k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 60.5k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted Chess Visualizer?
Chess Visualizer was hunted by Ivan Veselovsky. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
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Ivan Veselovsky
I’m still pretty new to chess, and whenever I play with my kids, I keep overlooking things and making blunders. But after watching some chess streams, I realized that even International Masters—people who have been playing chess for almost their entire lives—still blunder. So I’d been dreaming about a visualizer like this for a long time.
The idea sounds simple: visually show the attacks of every piece. But even my earliest attempts revealed a problem. Once all those little lines started crossing and overlapping, it became impossible to make out what was happening on the board. The whole picture was simply unreadable.
So I started experimenting with displaying attacks as rays and coloring the backgrounds of the squares according to each side’s attack strength—a kind of heatmap. Eventually, I found a setup where the visualization actually helps instead of getting in the way. It turned out that combining attack rays with square highlighting works pretty well, as long as the attack colors of both sides are blended in the right way.
Getting the geometry and colors of the attacks right required a lot of thought, experimentation, and fine-tuning. But when I play using the visualizer, it has helped me reduce the number of blunders to almost zero.
Try experimenting with your own way of seeing the board—maybe you can achieve similar results too. And if you discover a better way to visualize a position, please share your findings—it could help other players as well. The project is open source and released under the MIT License.
Play without blunders, and have fun! :)
Try it online: chess-visualizer.ivan-a87.workers.dev