Cute Chess for Mac.

Darius
Feb 1, 2023
2 min read

Updated: Dec 11, 2023

1.3.0-beta4 - the latest versions for Apple Silicon and Intel computers.

Cute Chess by Ilari Pihlajisto and Arto Jonsson, is a free open source program under the GNU GPL 3.0 license.

Cute Chess is a set of tools for operating, testing, as well as matches and tournaments of chess engines. It is a program with great traditions, developed for more than a dozen years. It is especially popular among those who work with chess engines in a Windows environment.

Cute Chess is distinguished by the fact that, in addition to the graphical interface offered, it allows you to work via a text interface. On Macs, this text interface is of course invoked via the Terminal program.

Some screenshots.

Cute Chess on Apple Silicon-based Mac.

Cute Chess on Intel-based Mac.

It offers an attractive and...

...highly customizable graphical interface.

Looks great in Dark Mode...

...which is available on Macs.

Four tournament games at the same time :)

An example of using a text-based interface; a match between two chess engines.

Many computer chess aficionados, including myself, hope that the Developers will soon release the final version of Cute Chess 1.3.0. When that happens, I will certainly consider taking this program into my reviewing workshop.

Ready-to-go versions of Cute Chess 1.3.0-beta4 for Linux and Windows have been released.

Unfortunately, I could not find a Mac version. And this was the reason that I prepared this program in two versions, for:

Apple Silicon-based Macs, for the latest Macs using M1, M1 Pro, M2 cpu's, etc.
Intel-based Macs, for modern Macs (Intel cpu's supporting avx2 instructions).

Mac Apple Silicon – Compiled by Darius

Mac Intel – Compiled by Darius

Source Code – by Ilari Pihlajisto and Arto Jonsson

My sincere thanks to the Creators of Cute Chess, for providing such an excellent program :)

In the Files area you will find free chess engines for download.