Banksia GUI (BSG) can connect and control engines to play as Lichess bots. As usual, BSG can help much to make everything to be visual, auto, and easy. Users can watch live games with all information such as chess boards, computing info… Setup engines, change between them, select opening books… all are easy and quick too. Furthermore, BSG can manage multi bot accounts.
1) Create a Lichess bot account and get API key
- Create an account for your bot on Lichess.org. If you want to convert from an existing account, that account must not play any game before
- Create a token (named OAuth2 token). After logging in, use this link to create the token. Don’t forget to select the box “Play as a bot”.
A token is a string, e.g. Yb1aaKrLere43HQ9, you should copy and store carefully, then enter to BSG.
Note: There is still another step to upgrade your account to bot account but BSG will auto-detect and do that step for you.
2) Add a bot record to BSG
In BSG, turn on Lichess bot panel (menu -> connection -> Lichess bots). Click on the button with plush (“+”). An empty row will be added to the below table. The row has 3 cells in the pink color you must fill. Double click on those cells to setup:
- Name: just type any name you want. Note that the real bot name is the account name
- Token: just copy the token string from (1) to here
- Engine: select an engine to play for the bot
After filling in all 3 cells, BSG will fill the rest and display the row as illustrated image.
3) Login, logout
Click on the button “Go online” (in the first column) to log in. When logging in, click that button again to log out.
4) Auto accept challenges
BSG Lichess bot auto-accepts challenges from other players. The conditions to accept can be changed from the left above box.
5) Challenge
The bot can challenge other players. It can auto-repeat to keep playing all the time. To challenge, click on the button “challenge” to open the Challenge dialog.
a) Create the player list
Names of players who the bot can challenge should be entered first. Click on the button with plush (“+”). An empty row with pink color will be added to the below table. Double click on the cell “Name” and enter the name of a player.
Names on the player list can be deleted, re-orders. Just select and use buttons on the top of the table to do.
b) Challenge
Select one or some players from the list by ticking on their checkboxes. Set up parameters of timer for the game. When everything is ready, click on the “Challenge” button to start.
BSG will auto challenge selected players (one or several players at the same time depending on the value of concurrency). If a player doesn’t reply to the challenge, BSG will wait for a while (timeout) then move on to to the next one. Before challenging a next player, BSG will wait for the period of the “Delay” parameter, then to challenge him.
After all selected players are challenged and if the checkbox “Repeat” is unchecked, BSG will stop challenging, otherwise, BSG will be back to the first selected one and continue challenging.