Fritz for Fun 13

Fritz for Fun 13 is the best chess program I have played. Prior to this I played fritz 5.32 as white and Windows chess as black. In friend mode the program is quite sharp without being impossible. I've only played 3 games so far and each of them was very instructive. Fritz pushes the margin and makes you think. It doesn't play mechanically where you have to survive 20 moves then it makes an obvious blunder. It plays a full game and not a gauntlet you have to survive through. The 3d chess pieces and manual board orientation offers the perfect viewing angle as if you yourself were leaning over a chess board pondering. It offers a lot of tools for practice and such but I play chess for fun and am not too critical. The evaluation profile window and the main engine window with the control board are staples of fritz for reviewing your games to see how you did. For positions where you don't understand why the computer uses the line it does in the main engine window you can use the analysis o...

After installing it & trying to start the game, it asks me to enter the code above - and no matter what characters I put in, it just says they are wrong charcters. I try again and again but to no avail. Still can't figure out what is is up to - just a waste of money and time.

Fritz for fun 13 is a good value. You get the Fritz interface which is great and has with lots of options and utilities. The engines it comes with are single core but still very strong. You can easily install any UCI engines you want and there are plenty of good ones out there like Houdini 1.5, Komodo 4, Stockfish etc. You might want liquid cooling if you run all of your cores though - they get pretty warm looking at 10 million positions/second. I even found some user designed 2d pieces you can install in you're fonts directory. On the downside deleting games in the database and uninstalling/reinstalling didn't work as expected. I prefer a program to remove everything (files, registry entries etc.) when you uninstall. Because it didn't I deleted some files manually and when I reinstalled they didn't get installed so I ended up using a system restore. Overall it's best chess software I've used so far with a good interface, lots of features and flexibility.

Does not retain clock settings and a few other settings from one startup to the next. Crashed when I attempted to change opening book. 3D boards did not work on Windows 7 32-Bit with Nvidia 3100M graphics card with 256 MB of video memory. The Nvidia 3100M, although a business class card, has run all other video games extremely well. Couldn't find where to turn off the bloody arrows. I kept turning off "Spy," but that was not apparently the correct setting to turn off the arrows. I'm 1800 USCF strength -- I know how the pieces move! The interface has changed greatly since the days of Chess Tiger 14 and Hiarcs 8 on disk. I have both. Seeing what has happened to the Fritz interface since then is like going to your high school 5-year reunion and seeing the short, skinny, and very cute ginger tomboy who sat next to you in English class whom you always regretted never asking for a date waddle in weighing about 450 pounds. You drop your drink, wet your pants, run screaming out of the reunion...

Bought it for 5$, added Stockfish engine. Works well. Database is nice to have. The Fritz 13SE engine seemed a bit... Crap. I have more than 54 hours in it, offline mode.

Really cool in 1998. First-off, powerful chess engines are awesome for academic chess nuts but even they are easily beaten by far simpler engines. Basically you don't even need a powerful chess engine unless you're at least in the competitive realm. And then came cloud computing and Machine Learning, and in 2022 you can hardly throw your king at your opponent without hitting an ML-powered engine that would easily beat the pants off most Russians -- so the appeal of a "3000 ELO engine" is really imaginary. Well that's where Fritz buries itself - its only saving grace would then be presentation, presentation, presentation - and my gods does it ever suck at that. You really get the impression that the developers think "the engine should sell the package, the visuals and interface are secondary" and omg are they ever not. Given that they all now have access to engines that will beat the p*ss out of anyone, the ONLY thing to distinguish one engine from another is its usability and bling. ...

Buggy and too complex.

I have played chess at club level. I think this software is enough for analyze the chess game. You can input mutiple chess engine in to the program. There are thousands of chess game from the grandmaster to learn from. At first the program is difficult to use, the interface is sure confusing. If you don’t want to spend money, i would suggest free mobile application as an alternative.

it's mindless

I strongly advise against buying this. It demands an activation key which it does not provide. This is sometjhing no other Steam game has ever done . I'll be asking for a refund.