ExaChess Home

Welcome to the home of ExaChess!

ExaChess is a powerful, full-featured chess-database program for the Macintosh. It can manage a database of millions of master games, serve as a chessboard to play through games, and be used as a tool to record and annotate your own games, to play games against the computer, or to play perfect endgames. See Features and Screenshots below to find out more, and Ordering for pricing, ordering and contact details.

ExaChess Lite is a freeware version of ExaChess which provides most of the features of ExaChess in a version suitable for maintaining a personal games collection. You can download ExaChess Lite from this web site.

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ExaChess [Pro] 4.5b6, a beta version of the next release of ExaChess, is now available to registered users of ExaChess. You will need to go to the ExaChess Downloads page from within ExaChess to download it.

ExaChess Features

Both ExaChess and ExaChess Lite provide the following features:

ExaChess has the features of ExaChess Lite plus the following:

Screen shots

Chess games

Chess games are presented in a Game window that looks like this. The window is resizable, you can use other chess fonts in place of the built-in piece set, and can set the color of the board and pieces.

Databases

Databases are shown through a database window. The window is resizable and the column widths are adjustable. The optional sidebar lists all databases in the ExaChess Games folder. Clicking on one or more databases shows the games from those databases. Searching for games within such a selection of databases is very easy and very fast: Enter information into any of the Players, Event, Result, Opening or No. field and ExaChess will filter the displayed games to only those that match the entered information. In addition you can do a wide range of positional searches through a simple dialog.

Database list

Databases are simply placed in the ExaChess Games folder and can then be accessed from the Games menu or the sidebar of a database window. The All Databases window lists all the databases, their formats, and the number of games in them.

What's New in ExaChess 4

The major new features of ExaChess are as follows:

ExaChess 4.0 has over 100 feature improvements and bug fixes to the previous release. Among them:

And for users wanting to buy ExaChess:

Changes between 4.1 and 4.0.2

ExaChess 4.1 is a minor update of 4.0.2, making the following three changes. The changes affect the support files only - the main application is unchanged from 4.0.2:

What can I do with ExaChess?

If you use a Mac and enjoy chess, whether as a casual player wanting a bit of fun or as a serious student of the game, then ExaChess has something to offer you.

ExaChess as a chess database. If you haven't used a chess database before, here's what you can do with ExaChess and a reasonably sized game collection:

ExaChess as a chessboard. It's easy to move the pieces, take back moves, add annotations, keep a move tree of all the lines you explore.

ExaChess as a chess partner. Its built-in engine lets you play against the database to test your opening repertoire. It works with external chess engines, providing the user interface while a chess playing program calculates the moves, and can host a match between two chess playing programs.

ExaChess as a chess publisher. It can directly print games with full formatting, figurines and diagrams. It can export a single game or a whole database of games with formatting, figurines, and diagrams in RTF (Rich Text Format) format for import into word processors or page layout programs.