Chess

Chess is a classic board game. This page is to help players explore their options.

Groups
Games require your user to be in the games group.

Stockfish
Stockfish is one of the strongest chess engines in the world. It is also much stronger than the best human chess grandmasters.

Sjeng
Sjeng is suitable on easy mode for beginners. It's hard mode plays hard, but loads the CPU.

Crafty
Crafty is another very difficult chess engine.

Phalanx
Phalanx is an engine that is more human like than others. It is extremely difficult. This engine is buggy allowing illegal moves to capture pieces.

Gnuchess
Gnuchess is impossibly difficult. Gnuchess has a cli front end, or the engine its self can be used for other front ends.

Eboard
EBoard is a user-friendly chess client to play against a local chess engine, a remote Internet Chess Server (ICS) or directly against another Eboard user on a remote computer. In relation to ICS, it has a special focus on the Free Internet Chess Server. It comes with graphical themes and a chat window when playing remotely.

It is possible to automate Eboard actions using scripts. This is an example of an auto login script that needs to be placed in.

Gnome-Chess
Gnome Chess is a high quality front end that supports multiple chess engines, 2d graphics and 3d graphics.

Scid
Shane's Chess Information Database is a powerful Chess Toolkit. It can interface with XBoard engines (such as Crafty and GNU Chess), and UCI engines (eg. Fruit). Using Scid, one may play games against human opponents (on the Free Internet Chess Server), or computer opponents. Database features include a Move Tree with statistics, Player Information and Photos, and General Searches for specific endings (e.g. pawn vs. rook or rook vs. queen), positions or players.

Xboard
Xboard is a lightweight front end. Among its many options, it can analyse games and have two engines playing against each other.

Pouetchess
Pouetchess is an all in one chess program. It is 3d and consumes the entire screen. It has several levels of difficulty, though it does not have an absolutely no resistance mode where you can easily check mate the opponent.

pychess
The pychess engine works really well with difficulty scaling, however as it is python it loads the cpu even on very easy.

External Resources

 * http://www.freechess.org