Free Internet Chess Server (FICS), which can be found at www.freechess.org, is a great way to play chess online for free. Besides being free, another great thing about FICS is the presence of a huge community, so that you’ll always have someone within your playing level to start a game with. It is also highly moderated by system and human moderators so that trolls and cheaters are quickly identified and acted upon accordingly.
I used to connect to FICS via Winboard or BabasChess on my Windows machine. But now that I’m on a Mac (specifically on an Intel, Mac OS X Lion 10.7, Macbook Pro 13″ Early 2011), these two programs don’t just seem to work. Good thing I stumbled upon a comment from one user in the FICS group in Facebook about Raptor Chess.
So when I did install it, it was actually like BabasChess for Mac. So thanks to the developers of this program, now I can enjoy playing at FICS natively on my Mac.
March 5, 2012 at 8:36 am
how can I contact Raptor.
chess board screen does not open
October 9, 2012 at 8:26 am
Jin is well worth the download too! I highly recommend it. Unlike Raptor it allows for a full screen view – very immersive.
January 14, 2013 at 4:28 pm
Yeah there needs to be a way for you to play offline with chess engines.
How do you do that? Can you implement that feature for us?
April 17, 2016 at 7:25 pm
Raptor is great for advanced users.
If you’re on Mac and haven’t ever tried playing on FICS, or maybe you’re not playing too often, there’s an alternative – http://lightfics.brrm.ru/ . LightFICS is very simple to use and it doesn’t need Java on Mac.
April 20, 2016 at 1:31 pm
Thanks Daniel! Will definitely give LightFICS a try soon!