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What are good chess clients for Mac, that allow playing on FICS. Nice-to-haves are an opening book, plug-and-play engines, and scoring of chess positions.

EDIT: For completeness, note that Jin does not allow you to save games. FICS can email them to you if you turn on a setting, but no way to recover guest games with Jin. I think this is a complete deal breaker.

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  • Have you tried any clients already? Would you consider installing Windows on your Mac using bootcamp?
    – user2001
    Commented Dec 2, 2013 at 20:24
  • @FMRauanSagit No. I tried Jin and Raptor. Kibitz also, but it's buggy as all hell.
    – Daniel Kats
    Commented Dec 6, 2013 at 3:10

5 Answers 5

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You have choices:

i. Kibitz, implemented features are

  • Playing and observing chess games on FICS
  • Observing multiple games
  • Chat with other users on FICS
  • Support for chess variants including "Bughouse" and "Crazyhouse"

ii. Raptor, FICS desktop client for Mac

iii. Jin, which is Java based and can be executed on a Mac also.

iv. XBoard, a multi platform solution!

 

and such a pity that you can't try BabasChess (maybe you can use a emulator to execute it on your Mac)

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  • Hello, I have found the lost source code from Kibitz on Berlios from the developer and am working to modernize the code. Shameless plug for project: github.com/fulldecent/kibitz
    – William Entriken
    Commented Sep 1, 2014 at 4:36
  • Just following up, this project is still moving and we have gotten it to compile on the latest Mac version now (10.11 El Capitan)
    – William Entriken
    Commented Nov 19, 2015 at 15:19
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When I switched to OSX I noticed that Babaschess would not run. Since I am a developer I started creating my own client.. Please, have a look and let me know what you think. It doesn't support chess engines to analyze positions, but saves your games as pgn.

http://www.macbeth-ficsclient.com/

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If you want something very simple to start with, try LightFICS: http://lightfics.brrm.ru/

It's a native Mac OS X FICS client. It has no dependencies, is extremely easy to install and use. It doesn't have any nice-to-haves, but you can save games as PGN and use other tools to analyse openings with engines.

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I don't have a mac, and i'm not a FICS user, here's what i found by googliing

http://sourceforge.net/projects/kibitz.berlios/

http://chesshive.com/2011/08/raptor-chess-fics-desktop-client-for-mac/

http://www.reddit.com/r/chess/comments/18kbm9/what_software_do_you_use_with_fics_on_mac_osx/

http://www.chesscircle.net/forums/showthread.php?2420-Macintosh-ICC-FICS-client

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  • FYI, the kibitz link here is just the archived version when BerliOS unfortunately went dark. The other answer has the updated link for the currently maintained version of this project.
    – William Entriken
    Commented Nov 19, 2015 at 15:20
  • @FullDecent good to know for mac users, but as of right now, as im posting this comment, the other link gives server not found, sourceforge always works
    – Lynob
    Commented Nov 19, 2015 at 16:40
  • Sorry, not the berlios one (that project is RIP), talking about the GitHub one
    – William Entriken
    Commented Nov 19, 2015 at 20:43
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ChessX is phenomenal. I can confirm it works under Mac OS Ventura:

https://chessx.sourceforge.io

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