ScanChess

ScanChess goes after a chore every over-the-board player knows: the scoresheet goes in a folder after the round and the game is never looked at again, because typing it in takes longer than the game deserves. Photograph the pages, and the moves come back on a board beside the original, with any move that is illegal or that the model wasn't sure of flagged for checking. Fix those, export the PGN, and the game is ready for Lichess, Chess.com or ChessBase.

What separates it from the board scanners is the handwriting. Chessvision.ai, the established tool in this category, reads boards and diagrams; it does not read a scoresheet. ScanChess does both, and its board-to-FEN side is the familiar one: a screenshot or a book diagram comes out clean, a top-down photo of a real board usually does, and an angled shot of carved pieces will need a square or two moved. The site says so itself, which is the right tone for OCR.

The design choices are sensible. A doubtful move is never rewritten; it is marked, and the editor proposes the legal moves nearest to what was written. A second check looks for material that behaves the way no real game does - a piece left hanging that nobody takes - and flags those plies too, since a misread move is usually still a legal one. No accuracy figure is quoted anywhere. Expect to check a few moves in a typical game, and treat an unflagged move as probably right rather than certainly right.

Pricing is credits only. Ten come free with sign-up and no card, a scoresheet costs two whatever its page count, a board costs one, and editing, replay, export and history are free on every account. Pro at $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year adds 100 credits every 30 days; Pro+ five times that. For a club player with a handful of tournaments a year the free credits and an occasional Pro month will do; the annual plans are for coaches and arbiters, and the batch mode - a whole round grouped by board number with a pairing list, exported as one PGN plus a list of what still needs a human eye - is clearly built for them. Read the refund policy first: there are no refunds, including for unspent credits.

The company behind it is the weak point. The site names SudoAI as the operator but gives no legal entity, address or country, the domain dates from January 2026 and the terms from August. An iOS app and a Chrome extension are mentioned throughout, yet neither has a store link on the site and no App Store listing could be found. None of that touches the web product, which is documented with unusual care, but it is worth knowing before buying a year up front. This review is based on the site, the free examples and the documentation; we did not create an account or scan our own scoresheets.

For anyone with a pile of handwritten games, the ten free credits are worth spending. Pay only once the recognition has proven itself on your handwriting.