Play GNU Chess Online

GNU Chess came out in 1984 as part of the MS-DOS Classic Games series, developed by Stuart Cracraft. It was a straightforward chess program for its time, running on the hardware people had at home, without any graphical embellishments or dramatic flair. You loaded it from a floppy disk, and it presented the board in simple text characters, a common sight for strategy games on early PCs.

You control the white pieces, making moves by typing algebraic notation like "e2e4" to advance a pawn. The main objective is to checkmate the computer's king, but the program calculates its responses with a cold, methodical efficiency. Its signature mechanics include a visible evaluation bar that shows which side it thinks is winning and a thinking timer that ticks away as it searches for the best countermove. The pacing is deliberate, sometimes slow on older machines, and the difficulty is unrelenting for newcomers. That moment when the computer finally makes its move, often capitalizing on a positional weakness you didn't even see, makes every game feel like a stern lesson.

Each game uses different controls, most DOS games use the keyboard arrows. Some will use the mouse , "Alt" ,"Enter" and "Space bar".