Lucas chess is also nice
Best Free Chess Engine and GUI
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scid vs pc is great.
What do you want out of Gui? Lucas Chess does seem a good middle ground.
Sep 6, 2016
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#5
There are many uci-compatible chess programs (aka GUIs) out there, and it's likely that what one person absolutely adores the next absolutely abhores. That said, I'd personally reccomend the Lucas chess GUI as the best. All the reasons why is beyond the scope of this post, however here are several reasons...
- free tactical puzzles
- Awesome game analysis
- many free engines preloaded into the program
For more information about GUIS, read Free Chess Programs for UCI Engines, which will help compare and contrast different GUIs and their strengths and weaknesses.
I recently purchased a new computer so I figured I would try out a different chess engine GUI. I have Arena with Houdini on my old computer. It was okay after a bit of tweaking and learning its quirks. However, after a bit of Googling, I decided to try Tarrasch (http://www.triplehappy.com/). I was a bit leary about going to that website since the URL looks its more likely to be a porn site than a chess GUI. Fortunately (or unfortunately?), it was a chess engine GUI.
There is an option to use it without installation, which is nice. Using it is amazingly simple and it works great. The pieces never get stuck like they do with Arena and setting up a postion is much easier (similar to Chess Pro on my iPhone). There are far fewer options than you have with Arena, but everything works like you would expect so you don't need the options. I would liken it to the iPhone when it first came out: simple, clean, and intuitive.
I wanted to post my experience in case anyone else is looking for a simple and good chess GUI. You just download, unzip, and double click the exe. It comes with a few chess engines, with Stockfish 6 (rating around 3300 and by far the best free option) as the default.
When I Googled, it wasn't obvious from the results that this was by far the best free GUI. It just seemed like another option along with Arena. Is there some other option that is better? Are any of the paid ones really better. If so, in what way are they better?