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) |
 Read our complete collection of recommended free and open source software. Our curated compilation covers all categories of software. The software collection forms part of our series of informative articles for Linux enthusiasts. There are hundreds of in-depth reviews, open source alternatives to proprietary software from large corporations like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, IBM, Cisco, Oracle, and Autodesk. There are also fun things to try, hardware, free programming books and tutorials, and much more. |