Chess software for players and coaches, built on PGN.

DanceChess is a family of free, open-source tools. DC Studio is a native Mac chess database — a ChessBase-style workspace for opening PGN files, annotating games, analyzing with Stockfish and reading opening statistics. The rest of the family is what a coach and a student use around it.

Download DC Studio for MacWhat it does
DC Studio: board, annotated notation, Stockfish analysis with three lines, and the game list
DC Studio 0.2: board and notation on top, the file's game list below, Stockfish 18 built in.

The family

DC Studio

A native Mac chess database. Open any PGN, annotate, analyze, merge games, print. Apple Silicon, free, GPLv3.

Coach

A command-line workshop for the coach: reads a student's games, diagnoses openings, builds repertoire lessons and puzzle books, writes the training course.

Trainer

What the student opens every day: one finishable list of openings to recall and puzzles to solve, on a spaced-repetition ladder, with a record of every answer.

InkPGN

Photograph a handwritten scoresheet, get a PGN you can trust — then be asked what you were thinking at the moments that decided the game.

Why PGN

Every tool here reads and writes plain PGN files. Nothing owns your games: a file DC Studio saves opens in ChessBase, Scid, lichess or a text editor, and a file any of those wrote opens here. The database behind DC Studio is only a cache; the .pgn is the source of truth.

Questions

Is DC Studio a ChessBase replacement?
For browsing, annotating, analyzing and preparing lessons from PGN files — yes, and it is what it was built for. It does not open ChessBase's own .cbh format and has no position search yet. The honest comparison.
What does it cost?
Nothing. GPLv3, source on GitHub. It bundles Stockfish 18.
Which Macs?
Apple Silicon (M1 and later), macOS 14 Sonoma or newer. There is no Intel build.