PyChess is a Gnome inspired chess client.
The goal of PyChess, is to provide a fully featured, nice looking, easy to use chess client for the GNOME desktop.
The client should be usable both to those totally new to chess, those who want to play an occasional game, and those who wants to use the computer to further enhance their play.
Key Features
- Attractive interface.
- Chess Engine Communication Protocol (CECP) and Univeral Chess Interface (UCI) Engine support.
- Play online for free on the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS) and for an membership fee on the Internet Chess Club (ICC)
- Built-in Timeseal client for FICS, so you won’t lose clock time during a game due to lag.
- Read and writes PGN, EPD and FEN chess file formats.
- Pre-move support, which means you can make (or start making) a move before your opponent has made their move.
- Built-in Python based engine.
- Works with most popular chess engines as long as they’re installed on your computer. This includes engines such as Stockfish, Rybka, Houdini, Shredder, GNU Chess, Crafty, Fruit, and many more). These engines are available as opponents, and are used to provide hints and analysis.
- PyChess also shows analysis from opening books and Gaviota end-game tablebases.
- Undo and pause functions.
- Board and piece animation.
- Drag and drop.
- Tabbed interface.
- Hints and spy move arrows.
- Opening book sidepanel using sqlite.
- Score plot sidepanel.
- “Enter game” in pgn dialog.
- Optional sounds.
- Legal move highlighting.
- Chess variants: Fischer Random chess, Losers chess, Horde.
- Play with problembot/trainingbot/tacticaltrainer on ICC
- Internationalised or figure pieces in notation.
Website: pychess.github.io
Support: GitHub Code Repository
Developer: Thomas Dybdahl Ahle
License: GNU General Public License v3.0
PyChess is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
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| 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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