Originally posted by Kunsoo
I don't want anything fancy. Just a simple free chess playing software download for my kids to practice on. It doesn't have to be rated grandmaster or anything, just enough to give my kids a challenge.
Any recommendations?
I'd also like to find a checkers program.
You have lots of choices. Do the programs have to play at beginner levels, or can they be fairly strong?
For chess programs: Are you familiar with the Arena graphical user interface (GUI)? You can download it from the Arena site. And if you can find the Ufim engine to install into the Arena GUI, the Ufim engine can be set to play down to about the 800 elo level or so. I can get you links, but I wasn't sure exactly what you're looking for in terms of strength and difficulty of installation. Of course, there are stronger free engines you can load into Arena if that's your goal.
And if you don't want the difficulty of installing a chess GUI, there are simpler all-in-one chess programs you can try.
For checkers: If you're looking for a checkers program that can play a fairly weak game, Checkers 1.3 is pretty good, if it will run on your system. Here's the link:
http://www.magicwandsoft.com/games/index.html
For stronger checkers programs, try searching Bob Newell's checker program reviews at this link:
http://www.bobnewell.net/checkers/checkerprograms.html
And here's some miscellaneous checkers links that you might search:
http://www.bobnewell.net/nucleus/checkers.php
http://www.fierz.ch/checkers.htm
http://www.jimloy.com/checkers/checkers.htm
http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Thinktank/7379/checkers.html
I hope that helped.