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.
While playing chess against a computer engine is popular, many people prefer playing chess against a fellow human. Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) is a popular server for chess players to play against each other over the Internet. It’s one of the oldest and one of the largest internet chess servers.
Here’s our recommended software to let you play chess over FICS. They are all free and open source software.
The ratings are determined solely in connection with their performance as a FICS client.
| FICS Clients | |
|---|---|
| ChessX | Chess database and FICS client |
| PyChess | Advanced chess client following the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines |
| XBoard | GUI chessboard for chess engines and to play against humans over the internet |
| eboard | GTK+ based chess board interface to ICS and chess engines |
| Jin | Java based graphical client for internet chess servers |
| Raptor | Chess interface for freechess.org (FICS) |
 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. |