Knights is an open source chess game. As a player, your goal is to defeat your opponent by checkmating their king.
Play chess against a fellow computer, chess engine, or on the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS).
Note, Knights doesn’t offer timeseal functionality for FICS (which adds internet lag back to your clock). So unless you have a good internet connection to the FICS server (i.e. low ping) or play games with long duration, we recommend you choose an alternative FICS client.
Key Features
- Play against computer engines. The software supports both the XBoard and UCI protocols. Play against engines such as crafty, Stockfish, GNU chess, and others.
- Animations with configurable animation speed.
- Flip the board.
- Accessibility options – speaks opponent’s moves, and allows other programs to control Knights. Jovie, the KDE Text To Speech Service, can be used to speak the opponents’ moves.
- Themes – Greyscale, East and West, Knights, Plain, and XBoard Two with the ability to get add-on themes produced by contributors.
- Optional markers – show legal moves for your chess piece, the opponent’s previous move, or a king in check.
- When playing on the FICS:
- Seek list – shows game requests from other players.
- Seek graph
- Challenges
- Console – text messages from other players and computers.
Website: www.kde.org/applications/games/knights
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Miha Čančula and contributors
License: GNU General Public License v2.0
Knights is written in C++. Learn C++ with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Chess Apps | |
|---|---|
| Lucas Chess | Highly polished chess app with superb training facilities |
| En Croissant | GUI chess toolkit |
| PyChess | Advanced chess client |
| Scid | Shane's Chess Information Database |
| Knights | Chess game for the KDE desktop environment |
| ChessX | Chess database and FICS client |
| ChessMD | Lightweight PGN database viewer and analysis tool |
| XBoard | Graphical user interface chessboard for chess engines |
| Cute Chess | Graphical user interface, command-line interface and library |
| Nibbler | Chess analysis GUI for UCI engines |
| GNOME Chess | Vala-based chess GUI |
| JFXChess | JavaFX Chess GUI |
| Obsidian Chess Studio | Chess analysis platform |
| CoreChess | Chess GUI for chess engines |
| SlugChess | Chess with Fog-of-War and shuffled officers |
| OChess | Chess game analysis software |
| eboard | Chess board interface for ICS and chess engines |
| Atom Chess | Chess engine built using Stockfish and Electron |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
| 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) |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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