Chess (OS X)

For other uses, see Chess (disambiguation).
Chess

Chess running on OS X Yosemite
Developer(s) Apple Inc.
Stable release 3.10 / October 22, 2013
Operating system OS X
Type Video game
License GNU General Public License

Chess is a chess game for OS X, and its progenitor, OPENSTEP, featuring a high-quality graphical display and support for chess variants such as crazyhouse and suicide chess. Also included are different skins featuring metal, grass, marble and wood (for both chess pieces and chessboard). It is bundled with the OS X operating system and is also distributed as free and open source software on the Apple website.[1]

The Apple Chess front end is a Cocoa application whose drawing code is based on GNOME Chess. It communicates with the Sjeng chess engine which runs in a separate process. In OPENSTEP and OS X up to version 10.2 (Jaguar), Apple Chess used bitmap graphics with a fixed, pseudo-3D, perspective, and used an early version of GNU Chess as the back end engine.

Chess can be also played using voice commands which uses Mac OS X's built-in speech recognition capabilities. Games can be logged using the log feature, which can include information such as names, dates, places, types of game and moves made.

In OS X Mountain Lion, Chess supports Game Center.

Modes

Regular

Further information: Chess

Standard Rules.

Crazyhouse

Further information: Crazyhouse
Mac Chess in the Crazyhouse Variation (with the notations in)

Players may drop in their opponent's captured pieces into play. For example, if White captures a Black Queen, the captured Black Queen becomes White's Queen for storage. Whenever White wants to put it onto the board, the player may do so. Pawns may only be put on the 2nd to 7th rank of the chess board.

Suicide

The aim of this game variation is to lose all your pieces. If any capture is possible the player is forced to capture the piece. The king rules do not apply to this mode.

Losers

Black wins in Losers variation

Like the Suicide game variation except all the king rules apply. Players have to lose all pieces except the king or checkmate the opposite king to win.

History

Apple's Chess application was first available in Mac OS X 10.2.

Version 3.1 that ships with OS X Mavericks adds a voice speaking "check" after such a move.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Apple.com — Chess source code
Books

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Chess (OS X).