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.
how can I contact Raptor.
chess board screen does not open
Jin is well worth the download too! I highly recommend it. Unlike Raptor it allows for a full screen view – very immersive.
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?
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.
Thanks Daniel! Will definitely give LightFICS a try soon!