Chess is a recreational and competitive board game played between two players. It is a very popular game, played by millions across the world, in clubs, online, by correspondence, and in tournaments.
Chess has the virtue of being suitable for people of all ages. It has many positive attributes such as to help individuals develop their memory, improve and enhance their concentration, as well as logical thinking. It also promotes and improves imagination and creativity. Chess is one of those games that takes a few days to learn and the rest of your life to master, with the game being a never ending learning process, even for the top players.
The game is played on a square chessboard with 64 squares arranged in an eight-by-eight grid. Each player controls 16 pieces, and the object of the game is to checkmate the opponent’s king.
Linux chess software generally is separated into a “front end” application and a “chess engine”. There is a wide range of chess-playing software for Linux, which can defeat most master players under tournament conditions. Computer chess has been a phenomenal success, aiding chess analysis, and allowing players to play when no human opponents are available. Other types of chess software include chess databases and tournament managers. Chess databases provide a convenient way to store your own games, a time-efficient method to study, and offers access to statistics about your own games and of titled chess players.
Here are strong chess engines. They all run under Linux, free to download, and published under an open source license.
| Chess Engines | |
|---|---|
| Stockfish | Very srrong chess engine which keeps getting stronger |
| Lc0 | Extremely strong neural network based chess engine |
| RubiChess | Uses magic bitboards. This engine is written in C++ |
| Nemorino | Very strong UCI-compliant engine |
| Igel | UCI chess engine forked from GreKo |
| Xiphos | Employs modern search techniques and multithreading |
| Laser | A very strong chess engine |
| Defenchess | Designed to be a strong chess engine. It's written in C++ |
| Andscacs | This engine doesn't appear to be actively maintained |
| Halogen | Powerful chess engine |
| Arasan | Includes an opening "book" with over 750,000 moves |
| Combusken | Uses the Alpha-beta algorithm |
| Berserk | Unusual chess engine with a unique style of play |
| Ethereal | UCI chess engine |
| Koivisto | Strong chess engine |
| Weiss | UCI chess engine written in C |
| chess22k | Chess engine written in Java |
| Demolito | UCI chess engine |
| Fruit | UCI-only chess engine. |
| Ghost | xboard compatible chess engine |
| minnow | Simple and fairly weak chess engine |
| ShashChess | UCI chess engine derived from Stockfish |
| Texel | Chess engine written in C++ |
| zurichess | Chess engine and a chess library |
| Critter | Chess UCI engine (freeware) |
Our recommended chess client is Lucas Chess. This lets you play against many top chess engines.
 Explore our comprehensive directory of recommended free and open source software. Our carefully curated collection spans every major software category.This directory is part of our ongoing series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. It features hundreds of detailed reviews, along with open source alternatives to proprietary solutions from major corporations such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. You’ll also find interesting projects to try, hardware coverage, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. Know a useful open source Linux program that we haven’t covered yet? Let us know by completing this form. |
These chess engines are so strong I cannot beat them even if they give me Queens odds.
Support Stockfish! Be aware there’s a commercial product that has just taken the entire Stockfish code, made a few tweaks and trying to flog it for a lot of bucks.