MaximumBunny: A few months late but since the thread was bumped, https://www-lucaschess.rhcloud.com/ is the one I use. You unlock stronger levels of an engine by playing against weaker ones. It gimps them until you beat their weaker versions.

You get hints from an engine of your choice, and the higher the level the less hints you get until you're one on one with it.

flanner: previously, gog offered chessmaster 9000 - very nice chess for amateur players.. i dont know why they withdrew it later..

i would like to buy it too... please gog, return it back

rtcvb32: Hmmm not sure I'd recommend any chess games.

When I have tried electronic chess or playing against the computer, depending on the difficulty they will make really weird moves, like moving a knight several places and then just out of nowhere just taking your Queen. In those cases playing on the easiest setting was harder than an actual difficulty level.

The difficulty also has more to do with raw brute force 1-4 steps ahead rather than determining a long term strategy. This means behavior will determine how much weight and value it put certain pieces rather than anything else. It also means they won't usually make obvious mistakes that someone might, like moving into place for an attack without protecting the piece first.

While being a strong intermediate player, computer AI is just annoying to deal with.

Lucius_Malfoy: As far as board games are concerned I've heard Tabletop Simulator is good. Apparently you can create your own games and there are unlimited possibilties. Unfortunately it's not on GOG though, I think it's just on Steam.

Gede: But different chess engines may provide different "feels". How they scale down is a different matter, but is clearly being worked on.

rtcvb32: Hmmm last couple days I've half considered making my own engine and just throwing it out there... would probably be ASCII and commandline input, and have the basic rules, as well as whatever advanced moves I know about.

Should I?

vsr: I've mentioned it in my post too. But then realized it has no possibility to play against PC (you can't use chess engines).
And edited it out.

Gede: If it is for the fun of it, go ahead. Most chess engines work that way, implementing a communication protocol used to talk to the GUI application. No need to draw the board or handle the UI.

There are already many chess engines out there. But if you think you can write another 1K ZX Chess, go for it! :-)

rtcvb32: It's amazing what you can do with a little tweaking and work. It's too bad we aren't pushing for super powerful/tiny programs anymore :P As I recall the Chess program for Atari2600 was 4k for their cartridge (then again all their cartridge games were 4-8k)

Alas mine won't be that small, I'll probably write it in D.