Welcome to chess.el, a client and library for playing Chess from
Emacs.

chess.el is an Emacs Lisp library and several clients on top of the
underlying library functionality for performing various activities
related to the game of chess.

You can play against an external chess program such as gnuchess,
crafty, phalanx or sjeng.  All of them are publically available, and
chess.el will automatically detect which one you have installed,
provided they have standard executable program names, and are in a
located in a directory which is part of the PATH.  See the
customisable variable `chess-default-engine'.

You can also play against another human or computer over the internet
(through a direct Emacs-to-Emacs connection, or on one of the Internet
Chess Servers like freechess.org or chessclub.com), or even against a
very simple chess thinking module implemented in pure Emacs Lisp.

chess.el also provides a mode for editing Portable Game Notation (PGN
files.

To improve your chessaility, you might also like to have a look at
chess-puzzle, which allows you to solve chess puzzle collections (in
PGN or EPD format) against one of the engines you have installed.