Operating Systems Mac OS X 10.4 PPC, Mac OS X 10.5 PPC, Mac OS X 10.4 Intel, Mac OS X 10.5, Mac OS X 10.5 Intel, Mac OS X 10.6 Intel, Macintosh, Mac OS X 10.4. In the Chess app on your Mac, do any of the following. Set the level of difficulty: Choose Chess Preferences, then drag the slider toward Faster or Stronger to decrease or increase the difficulty or speed (not available when you’re playing another person). Change the look of a game: Choose Chess.

1. Free Chess Mac
2. Best Chess For Mac
3. Chess Software Mac

It’s not hard to count the number of bundled games in OS X (not counting games available via Terminal). The total count is one—Chess, which you’ll find in the Applications folder. While you can run this game easily enough in the Finder with a double-click, that really wouldn’t make for much of a hint. Instead, we’re going to take a look at how you can directly access the engine that runs Chess from Terminal.

Why would you want to do this? Honestly, I’m not sure—perhaps you’re a chess addict, playing for hours on end, and you’re tired of all the beautiful 3-D eye candy in the GUI version. Or maybe you’re a purist, and you prefer to enter your moves in algebraic chess notation, instead of dragging pieces around. Whatever the reason, here’s how to access the guts of Chess via Terminal.

Chess, it turns out, is powered by Sjeng, an open-source chess engine. To access Sjeng, open Terminal and type this command:

cd /Applications/Chess.app/Contents/Resources

Once in that directory, you can launch Sjeng by typing (in OS X 10.5) ./sjeng.ChessEngine or (in OS X 10.4) ./sjeng. When the program launches, you’ll see some initialization output, and then a lovely rendition of a chess board done in ASCII—here’s a board after a few moves have been made (black pieces are denoted with a *, and are shown at the top of the board):

Below the board you’ll see the Sjeng: command prompt; this is where you interact with the program. Chess moves are entered in standard chess notation, using the row and column labels shown at the edges of the board. An opening move for white’s pawn, for instance, would be d2d4. After you move (press Return to execute your move), Sjeng will ponder for a bit, then make its move. Continue in this manner until someone wins, or you grow bored of chess and decide to quit. (Type quit to do so.)

Sjeng has a number of options to control things such as the time per move and how well the computer plays; you can read about these options by typing help at the Sjeng command prompt.

I did run into one quirk when testing this hint—Sjeng would occasionally quit with a segmentation fault error, usually after a lot of thinking prior to making a move. I found a workaround for this problem by running Sjeng with root privileges. To do that, use this command:

sudo ./sjeng.ChessEngine

Enter your password when prompted, then press Return. When running with root privileges, I never had the program quit with the segmentation fault—I don’t know why, but it worked perfectly when run as root. I would only suggest using this solution, however, if you experience problems when using it in the normal non-root method.

Sjeng is a very capable computer opponent—well beyond my “I remember that the bishop moves diagonally” talent level. Playing it in Terminal may not be for everyone, but for this child of the ASCII gaming era, it brings back some memories.

Free Chess Mac

Since OS X 10.2 Apple has included a Chess game by default on your Mac. The current version allows you to play against the computer with varying difficultly levels, play against another person, and even play online. You can change the look of the 3D board, hear moves and even speak to make a move. You can also save and resume games.

Check out Play Chess On Your Mac at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Best Chess For Mac

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Did you know that a chess game comes with your Mac and it has for a long time. You can find it in the Applications folder, it's right there, or just launch it with Spotlight by using Command space and typing chess. It's a pretty versatile app. It asks you to sign in with iCloud, I'll tell you why later, but for now you can just cancel and skip that. So, you can start a new game and there are several different modes in this chess game. You can do different variations on chess and you can also play human versus human. So you don't need a chess board with you. If you've got your MacBook with you, you can play with the person sitting next you. You can also do human versus computer and reverse the situation there. You can even have a computer versus computer game where they play each other. Now, once you start you can set the number of seconds that the computer thinks per move. The more time you give the computer to think the tougher it's going to be. So you start. Now you just move the pieces as normal. Just drag and drop. Then the computer will make its move and even call it out for you. So you've got this little microphone here and you can even show the moves there so you can see all the different moves. There are a whole bunch of other options as well. So, for instance, you can go into Chess Preferences here and you can set the board to be something different like a metallic board. You can even change it during the game and the pieces as well. Lots of fun options there. You can turn off the speaking moves right there. Even change the voice that the moves are spoken in. You can change the intelligence of the computer right in the middle of the game if you wish. You can even speak your own moves and it will understand you. You don't even have to click anything or hold a key down. It's always listening. I'm going to create a pause hear so it starts listening and speak a move. Pawn E2 to E4. Pawn C7 to C6.There is a bunch of other options as well. For instance you can take back the last move. You can have it show a Hint. You can have it reshow the last move if you missed it. Check this out. You can save a game. So in the middle of a game you can save it and then open that game later on to resume it. So you can have multiple games going at the same time or pause to continue the game another day. Now I mentioned that you can also do multi player and that's what that iCloud sign in was before. If I do New and I choose Game Center Match there, then I hit Start and it allows me to connect with people I'm connected to using Game Center. If you're not familiar with Game Center it is a whole other subject. But it is a nice thing to be able to do. The one last thing I want to show you is that notice that this is a 3D view of a chess board. So you can click and hold any corner of the board and then drag to change the view. You can rotate it all the way around and you can kind of drag it up and down just to get a slightly different view of the board if you want.

Chess Software Mac