Development on PyChess was started by Thomas Dybdahl Ahle in 2006, and the first public release was sent out later that year. The release contained the bare minimum of features to play a game of chess, and was backed only by the
GNU Chess engine. In the end of 2006, PyChess was close to becoming a part of
GNOME Games, which were holding a usage survey of aspiring new games to include in the suite. Being nearly just started at the time, it lost to the more established glChess, which managed to fix its hardware accelerating dependency before the end of the trial. glChess is still developed as a part of GNOME today. Afterwards there were talks of the two programs merging, but the developers decided they were targeting different user segments, with PyChess aiming towards more advanced users. In 2009, PyChess won
Les Trophées du Libre in Paris in the category of hobby computing. PyChess has grown steadily since then, with increasing year-to-year development activity, and would cost more than $500,000 to develop today in terms of the man-hours required to develop such a codebase. By 2011 it was among the seven most frequently used chess clients to access the
Free Internet Chess Server, which in turn is the only non-web-based chess server available for Linux. Version 0.12 of PyChess uses
PyGObject and GTK+ 3, prior versions used the obsoleted PyGTK. == Logo ==