Class Diagram for the Chess Game
Explore the process of designing a detailed class diagram for an online chess game using a bottom-up object-oriented approach. Understand the roles of classes like Chessboard, Piece, Player, and Move, and their relationships. Learn how design patterns such as Singleton and Command support this model. This lesson equips you to model complex game systems with clear class structures and interactions.
In this lesson, we’ll create the class diagram for the online chess game. We’ll follow a bottom-up approach: design the simplest components and build up to the core game classes, showing relationships and responsibilities throughout.
Components of chess
As mentioned earlier, we’ll follow the bottom-up approach to designing a class diagram for the chess game.
Box
A Box represents a position on the 8x8 chessboard, defined by a row and column (0–7). It may either be empty or occupied by a chess piece.
Chessboard
The Chessboard models the 8x8 grid of boxes. It maintains the game’s current state, including all pieces and their positions. The board is responsible for resetting and updating itself according to the moves played.
Piece
A Piece represents any chess piece (king, queen, rook, bishop, knight, or pawn) with a color (black or white) and an “alive” or “captured” status.
King,Queen,Rook,Bishop,Knight, andPawnare subclasses ofPiece, each implementing its specific movement logic and special rules (e.g., castling forKing/Rook, en passant, and promotion forPawn).
Move
A Move represents the transfer of a piece from one box to another, possibly capturing an opponent’s piece. The Move class tracks information such as the source and destination boxes, the moved piece, any captured piece, and whether ...