These are data files to play Finesse Chess with three different Chess Variant/abstract game engines, as well as a link to play it online.
Ai Ai is a “free beer” abstract game engine written in Java which can play a wide variety of abstract games, including a number of Chess variants. It’s possible to play on other grids, and it plays a lot of non-Chess games well, but it’s not as flexible as Zillions is with defining new games.
In terms of strength, Ai Ai plays about as well as a 1500 or so Chess player with its default settings of using 1-2 seconds to come up with a move. Unlike other generalized game engines, Ai Ai can also evaluate any game it supports, and it has the ability to generate puzzles for any abstract game it supports (this process took 3-4 hours or so to generate 12 puzzles with Finesse Chess, and the progress bar isn’t very good about showing progress).
FinesseChess.mgl is a file to be used by Ai Ai. As I type this, the latest version of Ai Ai is available here:
To install, put this .mgl file in the mgl/ChessFamily/Chess/Modern/
folder below the root of Ai Ai.
The license is probably the same license that AiAi uses.
FinesseChessZ.7z is a Zillions of Games implementation of Finesse Chess, as well as 23 other variants, including Classic Chess, four other Capablanca setups, etc.
Zillions of Games is a formerly commerical abstract game engine which is optimized to play Chess-like games well. It is still closed source, but the game is now donationware. It runs well in Windows 11 and reasonably well in Wine on x86 computers (or computers with a reasonable 32-bit x86 emulator).
Zillions of Games is a remarkably strong Chess engine, playing about as strongly as a National Master (2000 or so) at full strength, and it’s the most flexible Abstract Games engine I know of. It uses its own Lisp-like language to define game rules, and allows arbitrary pieces to be added, and can work on arbitrary grids; e.g. I have a Zillions file which works with Turtle Shell Chess.
The supplied file will open without issue in Windows 11.
If using Windows 10 or another OS which does not understand .7z
files, 7-zip is available at https://7-zip.org/
To use the .zrf file, do this:
FinesseChessZ folder, open up FinesseChess.zrfFinesse.sgf is a data file for ChessV 0.94 (probably 0.95).
ChessV is an open source (GPL licensed) Chess variant engine for Windows. It is restricted to playing a limited number of Chess variants on various square grids, but its playing strength is stronger than Zillions or AiAi, playing about as strong as a FIDE Master (somewhere in the 2200 to 2400 ballpark) at full strength.
To use the Finesse.sgf file, download ChessV
0.94 and place
Finesse.sgf in the include/ directory, then choose
“Load game” after starting up ChessV 0.94.
To play Finesse Chess online:
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