About bughouse.pro

Welcome to bughouse.pro: a free, adless, open-source bughouse chess server!

Bughouse chess (a.k.a. double chess, exchange chess, tandem chess) is a chess variant played two versus two on two boards. Pieces captured by one player go into their teammate's reserve. Each player has the option to drop a reserve piece on a free square instead of making a ~~boring~~ normal chess move.

There are variations in bughouse chess rules, and we aim to support them all. Whether dropping with a checkmate is allowed, whether pawns can be dropped one move away from promotion, whether a promoted pawn simply turns into a new piece or steals a piece from the other board — all of this and more is configurable. On top of that, we support the following chess variants:

Fischer random (Chess960). Pawns start as usual, while other pieces are shuffled randomly. We believe that this variant combines particularly well with bughouse: while bughouse makes endgame theory obsolete, Fischer random does the same to openings. Together, they let your imagination fly free from the chains of chess textbooks.
Accolade. Combine a Knight with a Bishop, a Rook or a Queen to get a Cardinal, an Empress or an Amazon respectively.
Duck chess. A duck occupies one square on the board and cannot be captured. Players move the duck to a new location after each move.
Fog of war (Dark chess). You only see squares where your pieces can legally move.
Koedem. Kings can be captured. The game ends when one team accumulates all four kings.

All these variants can be combined without limits. Have you ever wondered what it would feel like to play bughouse duck chess in fog of war? You’ve come to the right place! (Alternatively, if you have not wondered that, you might still be in the right place, because you really don't have to do that.)

We aim to add more options in the future. If you cherish a bughouse variant that we missed, if you feel your experience on this website is not crazy enough — please tell us. Our goal is to make bughouse chess do justice to its name.

Please note that this platform is in beta. Features may be missing. Games may crash. Ratings may be recalculated retroactively. If you encounter something that feels like a bug — please tell us.

Oh, and please join our Discord server to look for play buddies and stay in touch with our team!

Developed by Andrei Matveiakin
together with Konstantin Mandelbaum

For questions, comments, suggestions and bug reports contact us at contact.bughousepro@gmail.com or via Discord.

Source code: github.com/amatveiakin/bughouse-chess