![]() ![]() WinBoard: It isn't the prettiest GUI, but WinBoard and Xboard are feature rich and include support for chess variants, too. It includes a bunch of engines and training tools, and the UI isn't too confusing, even if you're unfamiliar with the more complicated functions of chess engines.Īrena Chess GUI: Arena Chess is more daunting for newcomers than Lucas Chess, but it includes a great deal of features, as well as support for 19 languages and a Linux verison. Lucas Chess: Simple and easy to understand for beginners. Most come with engines installed already, so you can get started with one download. To easily play against a chess engine or use it to analyze boards, you'll want to pair it with a chess GUI. (I consult the rankings from .)Īn engine alone won't do much for you, as they don't include any kind of graphical user interface, just a console. If you're not sure a chess engine is something you want to tinker with, don't buy anything-free engines are extremely powerful. These engines are primarily for training-you can play against them, analyze chess positions, and pit them against each other-so they're for people who seriously want to study the game. Komodo is also highly ranked, though you'll have to pay a subscription for the latest version (Komodo 9 is free), and Houdini costs €40 for the standard edition. I recommend the free and open source Stockfish engine or its derivatives. If you want to play against a powerful, customizable computer opponent for the purpose of studying chess, you'll want a chess engine. It supports online play with a separate account, and comes with a good computer opponent via the Stockfish engine (see the section below for an explanation on that). It's not nearly as slick as Chess Ultra, and it crashed on me pretty quickly, but hey, it's free. It offers a Westernized representation for these games, but the almost limitless configurability of XBoard/WinBoard also allows a high-quality representation of non-Western style games.For a free-to-play alternative, try Simply Chess. This means the GUI is able to display a wide range of variants such as xiangqi (Chinese chess), shogi (Japanese chess), makruk (Thai chess), Crazyhouse, Capablanca Chess and many other Western variants on boards of various sizes. XBoard/WinBoard also fully support engines that play chess variants, such as Fairy-Max. XBoard/WinBoard remain updated, and the Chess Engine Communication Protocol has been extended to meet the needs of modern engines (which have features such as hash tables, multi-processing and end-game tables, which could not be controlled through the old protocol). It also acts as a client for Internet Chess Servers, and e-mail chess, and can allow the user to play through saved games. Originally developed by Tim Mann as a front end for the GNU Chess engine, XBoard eventually came to be described as a graphical user interface for XBoard engines. WinBoard is a port of XBoard to run natively on Microsoft Windows. It is developed and maintained as free software by the GNU project. XBoard is a graphical user interface chessboard for chess engines under the X Window System. ![]() Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Microsoft Windows, macOS
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