Two weeks in on Scoresheet.
Two weeks into Scoresheet.
Before we wrote a single line of app code, we spent 17,625 lines understanding what already works.
We tore apart Lichess and Chess.com as products, lila as an architecture, Stockfish, Fishtest, Lc0, Maia and Chessformer on the engine side — then went deeper into how players actually analyse games, how puzzles are selected, and how a chessboard should behave on a phone.
80 research notes came first.
Every note answers the same nine questions. Every claim has a source URL or is explicitly marked NOT VERIFIED.
The nine questions are the same for every note, in the same order: what they do · why it works · what they do badly · what we should copy conceptually · what we can do better · what it would technically take · what could break · what we can uniquely do because of Nimiq
That template is in the repo. Check it yourself.
What came out of it:
• Game review that explains why, not just “-2.4”. It tells you the piece you left hanging, the pin you walked into — then gives the position back so you can find the better move yourself.
• Lichess-style puzzles: Daily, Endless, Storm, Streak and 12 themes. 5,000 puzzles bundled into the app, playable completely offline.
• Your own mistakes become puzzles — but only after the position passes our soundness checks.
• Bots that make human-like mistakes, inspired by the Maia approach, instead of simply being weakened engines.
• A board built for us: drag, tap-tap, cancellable premoves, in-place promotion, keyboard play, and full square announcements for accessibility. Even chessground, the board used by Lichess, ships without ARIA.
• Tournaments without arbitrary draws. Round-robin up to 8 players, Swiss beyond that, with the standings explicitly showing which tiebreak rule decided each position. And then there’s the part that only makes sense because of Nimiq. Both players sign the result with their wallets.
The rating is derived from those signatures. We don't issue it.
We can't revoke it.
Open a record, turn on airplane mode, hit Recompute your browser calculates the number locally.
That's why we're building Scoresheet here instead of making another chess website.
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3 comments
Prateek Tripathi
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Two weeks in on Scoresheet.
Mini Apps Competition
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