Free online chess games in HTML5

The ancestor of the video chess set is the electronic chess set, or chess computer.

The first electronic chess sets appeared around 1977, they were expensive and not very efficient. It is necessary to wait 1979 so that the public sees appearing chess computers at affordable prices (1000 francs all the same - approximately 150 euros) and with a good level of play.

Fidelity Electronics opens the ball and dominates the market with its best-seller (600.000 units sold) : the Chess Challenger 7 which has a rather good modular program (Sargon 2.5).

From 1982 onwards, competition sets in and the programs become more and more powerful, offering an ever higher level of play. The competition develops, and at the end of the 1980s, we are truly in a mass market, which offers different programs, different ways of interacting with the computer. Some electronic chess boards like the Milton Bradley from Intelligent Games have a robot that moves the pieces by itself thanks to a magnetic system under the squares of the board.

Electronic travel chess sets are also developing more and more with brands like Novag, Tandy, or Tiger...

But the end of the 1980s also saw the arrival of PCs in homes, and electronic chess sets were quickly overtaken by the ever-increasing power of the latter. The travel chess set is being challenged by the games on portable consoles.

We enter the era of video chess games, even if in parallel and still today, electronic chess games are still produced, for the simple and good reason that, today, the miniaturization of components allows to propose very good programs to electronic chessboards, and maybe also because the purist (not to say the old man) prefers to play in real, on a chessboard and with physical pieces.

According to my research, the first video chess game is Video Chess on Atari 2600, programmed by Bob Whitehead. The project of making a chess game on Atari 2600 seemed at first impossible because of the technological limitations of the console, but in 1979 the constraints were overcome and the first video chess game was born.

The evolution of the video chess game, in addition to following the one of the electronic chess games (i.e. to propose always more powerful programs and higher levels of difficulty), wanted to be innovative from a ludic point of view.

Very quickly, the pieces were replaced by colored, animated characters. The video games proposed different levels of difficulty, the possibility to choose the pieces, the chessboard, the decor in which one plays. Chess video games also offered tutorials and chess lessons. In order to lengthen the life span, chess video games have offered challenges and problems (checkmate in one move; two moves; three moves; ...)

Nowadays, chess video games even have "career" modes like Battle VS Chess and its two different adventures depending on whether you decide to play with white or black.

Especially chess video games have been able to develop graphically by proposing more and more realistic games.

Today, for whoever wants to play chess, whatever his level is, the video game is an unavoidable solution, since it is possible to learn in a playful way, to play against an artificial intelligence of a beginner level as a Grand Master, or even to play online against real opponents.

According to me, who shares a history and a particular affection with this millennium game, chess has admirably adapted to computers and consoles, as if they were destined one day to meet and unite.

The computer has proved its superiority in chess against man. It is the Deep Blue computer, developed by IBM, which got the better of Gary Kasparov (world chess champion) in 1997.

Indeed, the Deep Blue computer is able to calculate 200 million combinations per second. If today the computers that we use daily carry out a calculation "only" of 20 million combinations per second, that is largely sufficient so that the machine does not make any tactical error and exploits all those of its human opponents, which seem inevitable. The superiority of the Machine on the Man, is now acquired in chess, and no chess Grand Master is more interested to measure himself against a machine.

But the beauty of chess is that the game itself beats the computer: if a computer had been working at the theoretical maximum speed since the origin of the Earth, it would not yet have identified all the possible chess move combinations.

There are 318,979,564,000 possible combinations to play the first four moves in chess. Yes, it is possible to play the first four moves in 319 billion different ways! That's pretty cool!

That's why no chess program works only on an algorithmic basis, there is a part of heuristics that comes into play, an intuitive reasoning, and therefore it is not infallible. An idea that I like very much is the one evoked by some great chess players who say that their reasoning is neither algorithmic nor heuristic, but that it is based on an obscure, non-identifiable part, which appears as an illumination.

I propose you a list of the different chess video games from 1980 to today.

Non-exhaustive list of chess video games on Windows PC :

* 3D Chess

* Battle Chess

* Battle Chess 4000

* Battle Chess II : Chiness Chess

* Battle vs Chess

* Chess Academie : Pro Pro

* Chess Academie : Standard Edition

* Chessmaster 10ème edition

* Chessmaster 6000

* Chessmaster 7000

* Chessmaster 8000

* Chessmaster 9000

* Chessmaster: Grand Master Edition

* Combat Chess

* Disney’s Aladdin Chess Adventures

* Kasparov Chessmate

* Majestic Chess

* NV Chess

* Power Chess 98

* Star Wars Chess

* The Chessmaster 2000

* Virtual Chess 2

* Virtual Chess 3

* War Chess