I’m not sure how many people who read this play on FICS, but I’m hoping some of you do. For Mac users, I’m pretty sure “Raptor” is where it’s at. As far as graphics go, it is clean, simple, and the features are user friendly. It also shows you what variation you are playing as you play, which is pretty wonderful.
As a threshold issue I should add, FICS (free internet chess server) is identical to ICC in basically every way- you can even use the same clients- but you don’t have to pay for it. ’nuff said.
So, my question to you dear readers is this: what is the best client for a PC user? At the moment, I have babaschess, raptor, and jin, but I’m not thrilled with any of them. Raptor takes on a distractingly gross aesthetic in a PC environment (i guess that’s true of all things p.c. but somehow here it is even more pronounced.) Babaschess is what I have been using, but I’m not thrilled with it either. In any case, if anyone knows of another thread on a forum somewhere discussing this topic, or a list of a good clients or has any suggestions, hit me up in the comments.
I apologize for this post without any real content, but I’m desperate here.
5 Responses to “What’s The Best Client for FICS?”
When I used to play at FICS ( and this is some years ago ), I tried a few clients and Babas Chess was the probably the most useful. I also thought that Winboard worked very well, and was probably a better experience for longer games as one could avoid all the superfluous things in Babas and concentrate on the board & moves only.
Surprisingly Chess Assistant has a client for FICS ( & ICC ) and it is very good indeed. Sadly, it cannot really be used at ICC.
I gave up on FICS many years ago…too many strange/rude players there. At least paying at ICC seems to filter out some of these.
Thank you, I will check out Winboard.
It’s funny you say that about FICS. The reason I stopped playing on ICC was precisely because there were so many rude players on there and now I seem to be lucky in avoiding those interactions on FICS. I also realized that you can block people which is helpful for getting rid of those unpleasant opponents who are sore losers and worse winners.
Good luck.
The drawback of Winboard is that you need to know the raw FICS commands, which Babas smooths over for you !
Maybe I should give FICS another try…
Why aren’t you thrilled with Babas?
The one thing I don’t like about the other PC clients is the interface isn’t very customizable. But I’ve been able to customize Babas to look somewhat similar to Fritz.
http://rockyrook.blogspot.com/2010/10/configuring-babaschess-to-look-like.html
By the way, nice blog!
Take care,
I’m not extremely super computer savvy, but I will give customizing babaschess a shot. At first glance, the reason I don’t love it is because it’s just plain ugly. Again, I’m comparing it to Raptor for mac- which looks clean, simple, slick, and very well designed (at least visually- i can’t speak to the elegance of the underlying code since I know nothing of that world.)
I’ll check out your blog- thanks for stopping by.