Best 5 free Chess Software

Lucas chess is great program plus work with the DGT board

Your link leads eventually to two downloads:

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kiloNewton

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@merliUSA, im not sure if there are any difference.

you can e-mail the author:

start Lucas chess software > information > Contact.

Lucas Chess gives rating for playing engines of different strength. but starting algorithm is too slow - u start at rating 0, get nearly +25 for winning +400 opponent(greater is not allowed), and u have to play 40 games to reach 1000 rating point! -its maybe ok for perfect begineer, but, if some 2000 rated player wants to play his equal opponent he has to win 80 games first! it should be reprogrammed something like chess.com's method: at the beginning u should get/lose 200-300 points.

and The ScidvsPc should include flag button - now if ur fics opponent's time is over and he continues to play - u can do nothing!

You can type flag into the console.

And there is no feature difference in Lucas Chess installed vs. portable.

thanks pawpatrol. that worked.

Thanks !

Scid vs PC

No one asked  me but I'll give my opinion anyhow. Lucas Chess is the best freebie ever!  

I am a volunteer chess coach at an elementary school.  I am looking for a free PC program that my students can use for home study.  Here are desirable features that I am seeking:

1) simple enough that a ten-year-old can install and configure it on his home computer if I provide appropriate instructions:

2) display a simple, unambiguous 2-D chessboard (preferably green and white) with clearly identifiable chesspiece figures and alphanumeric identifiers on the borders.

3) Automatically play against the student after he makes his first move.

4) Allow the student to cut and paste Fen strings to set up various starting positions.

5) provide capability to move back and forth through any game in progress, e.g. with back, forward, and restart buttons.

Here are two programs that I have found, but each seems to be deficient re. my req'ts:

Mayura is is too difficult for a ten year old to install. I have twenty students, and none of them has yet been able (or sufficiently motivated) to install the program on his home computer.  Furthermore, the GUI is ugly, showing black pieces in white and the white pieces in yellow. The board diagram is small and cannot easily be expanded.

I like Lucas Chess, but I have not yet figured out how to get it into the configuration so that I can cut and paste a FEN string to set up a starting position (although once I managed to stumble into such a configuration that I have not since been able to re-establish). I think it might be the best candidate, but I need further instruction.

In Lucas Chess:

Play - Play against an engine of your choice - Initial Moves tab, start position Change - bottom right are the FEN tools.

Get the portable version of Lucas Chess, set up the board to look how you want, then package it up so that that is the default setting and put it up for download with instructions.

Thanks. It sounds like this might be the right track.  I will dive into this, but I suspect that I will need some further instruction, and I'm counting on you to help me get it working right.  I will try to reinstall the portable program that I was unable to make work earlier.  

A few days ago I emailed the creator of the program for such help, but so far he has not responded to my inquiry in that regard.  Will I have to give each student a USB flash drive? I'm fine with that; at three bucks or so a pop, that's may be an affordable proposition.

Just make  your changes, zip up the directory, and host the file somewhere (dropbox, maybe?).  Then give your students a link to the file so they can download it and unzip it.

Lucas Chess is the best, u can set FEN positions as pawpatrol says. Also there are videos on YouTube that give instructions about many other features. And if your students want to play against it they can set the strength of the game so that weak students can work their way up gradually to playing high level chess.   

Here's what I did five minutes ago. I downloaded the latest portable exe file, LucasChessPortable809a.exe from the Lucas website, put it on my FlashDrive K:, and executed it to create a folder K:\LucasChess with its content. Then I deleted K:LucasChessPortable809a.exe.  Next I executed K:Lucas.exe to start the program. The program came up fine it starts the game replay automation, which I interrupted by hitting the play tab.

Then I configured: Set to play white; Tarrasch Toy Engine Beta 0.905; time 5 sec; resign never; strength high level; hints  0. 

Next I clicked 'Change' in Start Position box and clicked Paste FEN position. Then I clicked accept to close that window.  Then I closed the Position window by hitting accept. Then I closed the Game against.... window by hitting Accept, which puts me back at the main Lucas Chess window. 

Then I copied a FEN string from another app to put it in memory, but then when I hit my Lucas Window with ctrl-V nothing happens!!

So I still don't know how to make the program accept a FEN string.

What am I doing wrong?

I stopped here, because when I just did this I got a game from thestarting position I entered.  This was all it took for me.

I'm using version 9 step 5, though.  Maybe there was a bug that was fixed in the meantime.

How does someone get to this:

I'm using version 9 step 5, though.  Maybe there was a bug that was fixed in the meantime.

http://www.mediafire.com/download/b55eedbpn3dd16t/LucasChessPortable9step5.exe

http://lucaschess.blogspot.com