Arena Chess GUI
Arena is a free Graphical User Interface (GUI) for chess. Arena helps you in analyzing and playing games as well as in testing chess engines. It runs on Linux or Windows. Arena is compatible to UCI and Winboard protocols. Furthermore, Arena supports Chess960, DGT electronic chess boards & DGT clocks and much more.
★ New: Arena 3.10beta for Linux (Fix for Debian)
The Arena project is kindly supported by:
Features
- Use Arena for playing games against chess engines, analyzing games or positions, and testing chess engines.
- Arena has an easy-to-use and configurable interface. Adjust Arena according to your personal preferences.
- Arena supports the protocols UCI and Winboard for the communication between GUI and Engine.
- Nearly all Winboard and UCI chess engines run under Arena. Strengths vary from very strong to weak, some have adjustable strength.
- For an easy start, some engines are bundled with Arena setup or zip file and are installed automatically.
- Detailed information: The analysis lines tell everything about the thinking process of the chess engines.
- Unique tournament features: Find out, how the chess engines compete against each other.
- You can analyse games automatically.
- Arena supports Gaviota tablebases for endgame analysis.
- Analyse position databases (EPD).
- Replay, search and filter game databases (PGN).
- Support of the DGT Chessboard for the game with real pieces: Connect the electronic DGT Chessboard to your computer and play a real competetive game against an engine.
- Support of the Novag Citrine Chess computer to play with real pieces (Windows).
- Arena can display the opening name, can use opening books, Chess960, analysis board, etc. etc...
Download
Arena 3.5.1 for Windows
Arena 3.5.1 is available since 2015-12-20
Arena 3.5.1 ZIP (17 MB): Arena 3.5.1 with engines SOS 5.1, AnMon 5.75, Hermann 2.8, Ruffian 1.05, Rybka 2.3.2a free, Spike 1.4, book Perfect_2010 by Sedat Canbas, mini book Titus 2.4 (by Kevin Frayer), mini book Olympiad, PGN database from Olivier DEVILLE, EloStat 1.3, Gaviota 3-men tablebases, Speedtest 1.0.2, flags, fonts, graphics, help files, without setup program.
Arena 3.5.1 setup (16 MB): Arena 3.5.1 setup includes everything from the ZIP plus engines Nejmet 3.07 and Dragon 4.6 plus move announcements.
This is mainly a bugfix release. Most important changes compared to last public version 3.5.1:
- Issues with large fonts or large caption bars fixed (Engine Management, Search)
- Dual monitor support improved: Maximizing to secondary monitor now works
- Tournament with ponder on does no longer halt if engine is resigning
- Tournament with ponder on: Arena book moves during pondering no longer lead to game abort
- Tournament with ponder on: Possible truncated principal variations and invalid moveerror messages in log removed
- Arena restarts in tournaments now always after at 20 games or less
- Tournament dialogue: Set filenames button takes path of .at-file into account
- Linux/Mac: Wine support improved: Redrawing is now clean
- Scroll Mainlines horizontally with Shift+Ctrl+Mousewheel
- Gaviota tablebase engine updated
- engines.ini updated
- Rare castling bug in Chess 960 removed: If a rook is captured and then replaced by the other rook, it was falsely allowed to castle
- Variation board: Engine's refutation moves now correctly marked in list
- Variation board: Mouse wheel now always goes through moves, shift+mouse wheel scrolls list
- DGT: Move display on DGT clock time was too short in some cases
- DGT board: If position on DGT board is the same as in Arena, you can continue game, the board is not automatically cleared
- Marks with very thick frames on board can no longer exceed square
- Optimizations for very small board sizes
GUI Translations for Arena 3.5+3.5.1
German and English is included in the Arena setups and zip downloads.
Arena 3.10beta for Linux
Available since 2020-01-19
arenalinux_64bit_3.10beta.tar.gz (40 MB): Arena 64 bit Linux, recommended for almost all modern computers
Note: You need a 64 bit operating system for this version.
Just unpack the archive to a folder of you choice and run the executable file.
New in this version:
- Fix for Debian 10, where Arena did not start
Arena 3.9beta for Linux
Available since 2019-12-28
arenalinux_64bit_3.9beta.tar.gz (40 MB): Arena 64 bit Linux, recommended for almost all modern computers
arenalinux_aarch64_3.9beta.tar.gz (39 MB): Arena for 64 bit ARM Linux, for Raspberry Pi or other computers with an ARM CPU (architecture: aarch)
Note: You need a 64 bit operating system for this version.
Just unpack the archive to a folder of you choice and run the executable file.
New in this version:
- GUI capable of using also Syzygy tablebases (up to 7 men)
- Please note that Syzygy tablebases show "distance to zero(ing the 50-move counter)" values, not "distance to mate"
- Tablebases handling improved: Syzygy, Gaviota and Scorpio tablebases now also get common settings (like Nalimov), so you do not have to set it for each engine separately
- Dialogs a bit larger for Linuxes that use much space for some dialogue elemnts
- Export or save selected games from PGN now inserts line feeds if necessary (sometimes this was wrong)
- Book import faster and auto-closing PGN list for speed
- Using local thousand separator of operating system now everywhere (e.g.: ,.' or others)
- Small improvements: Tab-order within dialogs, avoiding stay-on-top windows
- Ordo updated to 1.2.6
- Large symbols for the toolbar and other symbol set available
- Recently used engines now directly selectable in menu
- Help improved
- Move list faster and improved look
- Added 4 buttons under move list to show/hide values, comments, principal variations and book names
- Added no. of engine cores selectable in main menu, with keyboard shortcuts
- Commands [%clk, [%eval and [%emt in PGN files supported for reading
- Speed of arrows improved, hatched squares improved, arrow transparency now changeable
- Filter position: fixed more pieces than one on a single square, which were distorted before
- Fixed Tablebase move list, was not always aligned
- Even better support for dark OS themes
- Temp tab look improved
- Variation board: Mouse wheel supported for browsing the moves
- Character encoding problems wich special characters in some PGN games solved
- Compatible graphics mode for simple or not fully functioning graphics drivers (so we can see the pieces, e.g. Raspbian on Raspi 4)
- Lot of bug fixes and small improvements
Bundled engines x64-Version:
- AICE 0.99.2
- Alfil 12 MT
- Arasan 21.4
- Arminius 2017-01-01
- Gaviota v1.0
- Senpai 2.0
- K2 v.087
- Spike 1.2 Turin
- Stockfish 10
- TogaII 4.0.1
Bundled engines ARM64-version:
- Arasan 21.4
- K2 v.087
- Stockfish 10
- TogaII 4.0.1
Other included files:
Book Perfect_2010 by Sedat Canbas, mini book Titus 2.4 (by Kevin Frayer), mini book Olympiad, PGN database from Olivier DEVILLE, Ordo, EloStat 1.3 (Wine required), Gaviota+Syzygy 3-men tablebases, flags, fonts, graphics, help files
Note: I call this a beta because some testing is required and help has to be improved. The leap in version number is because I wanted newer versions to have higher version numbers regardles of operating system.
Arena 1.1 for Linux
Arena 1.1 for Linux is available since 2017-01-29
arenalinux_64bit_1.1.tar.gz (27 MB): Arena 64 bit Linux, recommended for almost all modern computers
arenalinux_32bit_1.1.tar.gz (22 MB): Arena 32 bit Linux, for old computers
arenalinux_arm_1.1.tar.gz (16 MB): Arena for 32 bit ARM Linux, for Raspberry Pi or other computers with an ARM CPU (architecture: armhf)
Just unpack the archive to a folder of you choice and run the executable file.
New in this version are mostly bugfixes and improvements in detail:
- Tournament bugs removed
- Mouse wheel deactivated during tournaments
- Open tournament in browser from tournament dialogue now works
- Free RAM display now from /proc/meminfo instead of SysInfo
- Rating calculation: "Aggregate results" and "copy files to" now works
- Rating calculation: Ordo works now additionally in ELOStat mode
- Rating calculation: You can import the rating results from file into Arena
- Many other bugs removed
- Better support for dark themes
- Small improvements in various areas
Bundled engines:
- AICE 0.99.2
- Alfil 12 MT
- Gaviota v1.0
- Hermann 2.7.1
- K2 v.087
- Spike 1.2 Turin
- Stockfish 8
- Arminius 2017-01-01 (only in the 64 bit version)
Note: The ARM version has only K2 bundled.
Other included files:
Book Perfect_2010 by Sedat Canbas, mini book Titus 2.4 (by Kevin Frayer), mini book Olympiad, PGN database from Olivier DEVILLE, Ordo, EloStat 1.3 (Wine required), Gaviota 3-men tablebases, flags, fonts, graphics, help files
Older versions
here
Links
Legal Notes
You are allowed to download the program package and install it on as many computers as you like free of charge.
Copyright Information regarding for Arena GUI:
Copyright (C) 2002-2019
by Martin Blume, Germany.
http://www.playwitharena.de
Used by permission of Martin Blume.
Contact: Mail to my given name+at+thisdomain
All rights reserved.
