Fritz for Fun 13 Reviews

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.

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.

For all its features and focus on accessibility, Fritz for Fun 13 is strangely inflexible. Using complex menus, getting in and out of the games you want, trying to use the frankly terrible 3D boards - everything feels so incredibly archaic and cumbersome, filling the experience with a clutter and roadblocks. Fritz for Fun is certainly capable, but I can't say that it's fun to use. There have to be better chess programs in this day and age.

Incredible graphics!!!! Best three D graphics anywhere!! Enjoy.

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.

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, and vow never ever to get married.

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.

Pretty good chess game, GUI takes a bit of getting used to. It works perfectly with my DGT board and the training functions are pretty cool.

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 options to analyse a given position and it will show the branches saying why this and that doesn't work. The only downside to Fritz for Fun 13 is it only supports one core. The only real downside to that is you can't use the 8 core Houdini engine to evaluate an opening in great depth and see what works and what doesn't(This is assuming you know the basic openings e.g. kings gambit declined, pirc, english, dutch ect.). You can get around that however by downloading the Arena GUI and running 8 core houdini from that. Conclusion: Perfect game if you like playing chess for fun; this is to say you play to match your wits against the computer and not to memorize chess databases and pantomime. After playing 13 games against the engine I found the friend mode to be too soft compared with fritz 5.32. You can blunder your way through a game and still win. With 5.32 I've played about 500 games and win on average 1 in 5. With fritz 13 I've played 13 games and have won 4 and lost 1. The longest time spent on one move might be 5 minutes. Longest game might be 20 minutes. I've played 50 minute games against 5.32 because it creates more difficult positions and if you make a single mistake you lose unless you are better than the base engine which I am not. Also it seems the fritz 13 engine has disappeared entirely. I only have the option to use the fritz 6 engine. The only way I have been able to get it back is to do a second install with the setup file which spreads files across multiple hard-drives. I played another game against fritz and lost my queen at the beginning of the game and was down -6 and still managed to end up with a draw. I think I was even +3 eventually. I played another game where I had hanging pieces(trying out a new chess set) and the computer didn't capture them. Brutally obvious captures on the control board the computer ignores. Aside from the generosity of fritz there is one particular position that I have difficulty playing against computers and that is roaming queen positions. e.g. Rook, minor piece, 2 pawns vs a queen with other pawns on the board. It's difficult simply because of the number of moves a queen can make on an open board and the computer calculates them all instantly. e.g. move 1 it can make five viable moves. Move two it can make 5 viable moves from each of its previous 5 viable moves. Continuing with induction by move 4 there is 625 move combinations(identifying the permutations is labor intensive). Harmonizing pieces and taking advantage of the fact the queen can't be traded still results in a difficult position where one of 625 possible positions being a fork can result in a loss. There is no end game exercise for this.

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. And the amount of effort invested in that shows - it's like a time machine to the 20th century in that regard. I guess there's the add-in value of multi-user play, historical databases, and tutorial content -- all of which are far better served by completely free or cheap alternatives. It's sad because I actually LOVE a good standalone, locally-run, pretty chess game -- someone looking at this would conclude there's just no market for those anymore, and they'd be DEAD WRONG. This is simply what happens when successful developers sit on their laurels while the world passes them by - an antiquated product whose relevance you can hardly explain without reaching into history books. Sad. You don't need it.