Open Source C++ Chess Games

Scid is a chess database application (cross-platform, for Unix/Linux and Windows) with many search and database maintenance features.

Stockfish is a free, powerful UCI chess engine derived from Glaurung 2.1. Stockfish is not a complete chess program and requires a UCI-compatible graphical user interface (GUI) (e.g. XBoard with PolyGlot, Scid, Cute Chess, eboard, Arena, Sigma Chess, Shredder, Chess Partner or Fritz) in order to be used comfortably. Read the documentation for your GUI of choice for information about how to use Stockfish with it. Stockfish is a 11-time winner of the Top Chess Engine Championship. Stockfish is open source (GPLv3 license). That means you can read the code, modify it, and contribute back. You can use Stockfish on your computer or on your iOS or Android device. So you can get world-class chess analysis, wherever you are. The Stockfish engine features two evaluation functions for chess, the classical evaluation based on handcrafted terms, and the NNUE evaluation based on efficiently updatable neural networks.

A free and open source chess database application for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

Eagle Mode is a zoomable user interface (ZUI) with file manager, file viewers, games, and more. This project is about a futuristic style of human-computer interaction, where the user can visit almost everything simply by zooming in. It features a portable C++ toolkit API for developing such ZUIs, and it features the Eagle Mode application, which provides a virtual cosmos with plugin applications. The most important one is the professional file manager with its rich, scriptable command set. It integrates file viewers for most of the common file types, as well as an audio and video player. Furthermore, the virtual cosmos contains a chess game, a netwalk game, a 3D minesweeper game, a multi-function clock, a stock watchlist, some fractals, and a Linux kernel configurator in form of a kernel patch.

Brutal Chess features full 3D graphics, an advanced particle engine, and several different levels of intelligent AI, inspired by the once popular "Battle Chess" released by Interplay circa 1988.

Scidb is an open-source chess database application for Windows, Unix/Linux. It is a new development inspired by Scid.

Chess engine code name "Gull"

XiangQi Wizard (Chinese Chess Wizard) is a powerful XiangQi (chinese chess) program, which supports UCCI engines. XQWizard Light is the Mobile version for Windows CE and Java ME. ElephantEye is the UCCI engine in XQWizard with strong AI.

EBoard is a user-friendly chess interface for ICS (Internet Chess Servers). While it will focus on FICS (www.freechess.org), should work with any other ICS. It supports playing against local chess engines too.

ChessDB is a free open-source chess database for Windows, Linux, Mac OSX and most UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems. ChessDB is based on code from Scid http://scid.sourceforge.net/ - a project for which there have been no updates for several years. In

A console/text based chess program with XBoard/CECP and UCI API, available on all major platforms. You may need a graphical chess interface to use it. Please refer to README.md in the files section for installation instructions. The last stable release is 2.1.9 and has been released on 19/08/2025. Belofte 0.2.0 till 0.9.20 (c/c++): Xboard 1 & 2 (CECP) - Linux/Unix/(Windows) Belofte 2.1.1 and up (c++11) : UCI and Xboard 2 - Linux/Windows/Mac/Android/... For access to code, please clone the git repository. Compiles and Runs on 32/64 bit on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android (ARM/x86) and Raspberry. Released under GNU v2 license. (means free to copy, free to modify, free to use, ...) Works fine with Arena/Cutechess/BanksiaGui/Winboard/Xboard/...

A 3D and portable chess game with an embedded Artificial Intelligence and some pretty good graphics.

This is a free, open source calculator of chess rating for tournament players. It has features like saving calculation with details. It has a multiplatform support thanks to Qt library, versions for Linux and Windows are released.

Gambit is a cross-platform chess game. There are binaries for Windows users. Users of Unix-like operating systems can check the web site for build instructions (it should be easy to follow).

Thief is a free chess client to play on chess servers like FICS: http://www.freechess.org It supports regular chess and all variants played. It is the best client for playing Bughouse, a special team-chess game (for more info see http://www.bughouse.

A triad of engine, GUI, and communication protocol for Chinese Chess (XiangQi). The two elements, engine and GUI, are interchangeable with any third-party application that follows the communication protocol.

chess program Bison

Chess Wizard is a powerful chess software to play, study, edit and publish games. It supports many strong UCI engines, provides a huge online database and hundreds of puzzles. Chess960 is available now.

SAN Kit was made public in 1993 by Stephen Edwards, the inventor of PGN Chess notation. The original code is in C, and with few comments quite cryptic. In addition, the original author's style was quite quixotic, making it even more difficult to read. This code is now reformatted to modern standards, adds support for NAG codes and comments, and has a "non-CLI" mode for inclusion in chess playing programs. The code has gone through extensive analysis using the llvm/clang compiler and reports no issues at this time. To use the code as a "framework" you would undefined "CLI". In addition, a small C++ program is included that takes as input a file of one or more PGN records, and outputs pure pristine PGN records as output. In addition to flagging errors at the move level, the program provides three boards around the move. NOTE: plan on budgeting a fair amount of time to read, re-read, and experiment with the documentation and cryptic uncommented code. You are on your own

Cassandre is an extensible chess engine written in C++, it is Winboard/XBoard compliant.

Project Invincible is a free, portable, open source and cross-platform chess game. Challenge a friend to a 3D chess battle or test your skills against a computer opponent. If the AI is too strong for you, just make it weaker with settings. After all, it's not a shame to lose to full strength of Project Invincible. :)

Chess for Windows. Created in Visual Studio /VC++. Has a basic colorful interface, features AI/CPU player. Future versions will have drag'n'drop, take back option, more visual AI move, different difficulty levels...

MinkoChess is a multiplatform chess engine written in C++.

A Chinese Chess (xiangqi) game for Linux and Windows. Aims to be fast, flexible and above all simple to use. You can play with your friends or against the AI.

Provides interface for working with chess games in PGN (use libpgn) make moves, and get result