Chess

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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.

Note
change $USER to your actual user you intend to be playing games

root #gpasswd -a $USER games

Engines

Stockfish

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

root #emerge --ask stockfish

Sjeng

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

root #emerge --ask sjeng

Crafty

Crafty is another very difficult chess engine.

root #emerge --ask crafty

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.

root #emerge --ask phalanx

Gnuchess

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

root #emerge --ask gnuchess

Frontends

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 ~/.eboard/scripts.

CODE FICS auto login script

#!/usr/bin/env perl
STDOUT->autoflush(1);

# proof of life to avoid hanging
print "hello\n";

# while there is input in STDIN, read a line
while(<>) {
  print "USERNAME\n" if /login:/;
  if (/password:/) {
     print "PASSWORD\n";
     exit 0;
  }
}

root #emerge --ask eboard

Gnome-Chess

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

root #emerge --ask gnome-chess

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.

root #emerge --ask scid

Xboard

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

root #emerge --ask xboard

All In One

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.

root #emerge --ask pouetchess

pychess

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

root #emerge --ask pychess

PVP

some chess programs only support player vs player.

Chessdb

Note
Not in portage

as far as 666threesixes666 (talk) can tell, chessdb only supports pvp mode, and no internet/networked mode.

root #emerge --ask chessdb

unreviewed

666threesixes666 (talk) didnt get to reviewing free internet chess server aka fics, eboard, knights.

External Resources

• http://www.freechess.org