Web site: www.chessv.org
Category: Games
Sub-Category: Board
Platform: Windows
License: GNU GPL
Interface: GUI
Wikipedia: ChessV
First release: unknown
ChessV (short for chess variants) – a free universal chess program for playing chess variants. It has a graphical user interface and has numerous features of classic chess programs such as support for the integration of libraries opening.
Features:
– Plays over 100 different Chess variants, including some that are quite exotic.
– Has a fully-featured graphical user interface, but the engine can also be used separately under another GUI (such as WinBoard) and other compliant engines can be used with ChessV’s GUI.
– Has a scripting language to allow configuration of new variants. It supports combining existing pieces and rules, and even defining new pieces, but creation of new rules is not supported.
– Plays with a fairly high level of skill. The engine can also be configured to weaken its skill level.
– ChessV is a .NET application so it can be run under Linux or MacOS using Mono. The C# source code is available.
The engine can play anything that is basically somewhat similar to classic chess. It is pre-configured for playing over 50 chess variants, such as Chess960 or Großschach, or via the rather unknown detour Capablanca Birds Chess also Gothic Chess, but can also be adapted.
Version 0.92 has 59 chess variants:
– 2 variants on 6×6 fields
– 20 variants on 8×8 fields
– 17 variants on 10×8 fields
– 16 variants on 10×10 fields
– 4 variants on 12×10 fields
The last version is 2.2 released in 2020.
Version 2.0, released March 2017, was a complete rewrite from scratch. It was six years in the making with over 250 files of source code.
Version 0.95 was the final version of the original ChessV, which was a native Microsoft Windows application written in C++. It was impressive for its time, but the source code was a tangled mess.
