10 Free chess playing software downloads for PC
Looking for free chess software to play chess? Well you have come to right page. In this article I will cover all the major free chess programs available for PC. Please note that I haven’t included any demo or limited version chess programs even if it is free. Also very old chess programs(which are no longer maintained) are also excluded. May be I write another post for them.
Some of these programs are chess engines which will work with third party chess GUI software such as Xboard.
1. Xboard and WinBoard – These are graphical user interfaces for chess engines. They don’t have any built in intelligence but offers an API for displaying and moving pieces on a chess board. Chess engines such as GNU chess can use these as the front end.
2. GNU Chess – This is one of the oldest free chess game available. It was written for Linux operating system and later ported to other platforms. You can download the Windows version here.
3. Brutal Chess – Brutal Chess is an open source chess engine and is targeted for multiple operating systems. It was developed recently and is still in the alpha stage. Brutal Chess features full 3D graphics, an advanced particle engine, and several different levels of intelligent AI. You download source code or a binary version for Windows here.
4. Crafty – Crafty is a chess program written by Robert Hyatt. Source code also is available. You can download crafty from here.
5. ChessV – ChessV is an open-source Universal Chess program with graphical user-interface, sophisticated AI, support for opening books, and other features of traditional Chess programs. You can download windows version of ChessV here.
6. Arasan Chess – Arasan is a free chess program for Windows and Linux. Arasan has Windows GUI but can also work with Arena or Winboard GUI softwares. Arasan also has huge opening book of about 75,000 moves! You can download arasanchess here.
7. Alpha Chess 3 – It is a compact and free chess game for Windows. Board and chess pieces can be customized and the program includes 5 built in themes. Works on Windows 98+. You can download alphachess here.
8. Lord of the Chess – This is free chess program with a clean interface. You can download lord of the chess here.
9. Jester – This is a free Java based online program. This means that there is no need to download anything! You can directly play the game by visiting here. You can also download (128KB) it here.
10. Der Bringer – This is a chess program written by Gerritt Reubold. You can freely download Der Bringer and use it. Der Bringer works in Windows 98, ME, 2000 and XP. It has an ELO rating of about 2150.
If you know of any good free chess playing software not included in this list, please do let me know. I plan to keep this list updated regularly.
Although not a chess playing program Scid (http://scid.sourceforge.net/) deserves a mention as it’s a very good, and full featured, chess database. It also can use chess engines like crafty to do game analysis or to play against. It comes in linux and Windows versions and for Windows there is a stand alone version that can be held on and run from a thumb drive, in fact I have a 1GB thumb drive with the both the program and a database of over a million games! Not to mention other files as well. Really, it’s excellent software that is pure open source and deserves a nod.