The game installs five other applications, each with its own installer process. I'm not sure if these are removed if the game is removed, but it is annoying. The game requires activation by key, which can only be done 3 times before you have to send an email to some third party to get more activations. The interface is terrible and unintuitive. The game graphics are fine.

If you're a hardcore chess fanatic this might be really interesting if you're willing to put in the time to learn how to use it. For casual players, there are many better alternatives out there.

This has to be about the worst computer chess game I've ever seen. The whole layout is cumbersome and unintuitive. The AI presets are wildly imbalanced (IF you manage to find them in the first place). You will NEVER get a satisfying win from the Fritz engine because it resigns every time it gets into a position where you can force mate in several moves whether you saw it or not. The 3D engine is poor and hit or miss whether it works at all. It's not just a case of "you can do anything with this engine but it's not for beginners" it's more like "the engine is quality at its highest settings (other than the fact that full depth analysis seems to take forever) and it has a highly extensive openings system (that you will never work out how to learn from)". Even chess enthusiasts who are perhaps swayed by Fritz's background as a 'serious' program should steer clear. About the only novel addittion here are the funny voiceovers and even they become just annoying after a short while. Do yourself a favour and go pick up one of the old Chessmaster games instead.

If you want a good, cheap, GUI to insert your UCIs into, grab this. It has everything you need for a low price, and accepts all the best engines. Why pay more when you're just going to stick Stockfish or Komodo into it anyway?

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.

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.

Fritz 13 is the last 'Fritz' by the original authors - version 14 used the Pandix engine by Gyula Horváth, and the forthcoming version 15 is apparently going to use one by Vasik Rajlich, who had his Rybka engine's world titles stripped for plagiarism. They are doubtless "better" engines in terms of being able to beat Fritz 13, but even on the weedy hardware (an AMD A4 cpu) I run Windows on and even though it is limited to using only one CPU, Fritz 13 is looking at many millions of positions a second, and has checked every one within 20 moves within very few seconds. This means that unless you are a grandmaster, on its best settings it will destroy you every single time.

So why get it?

Well, you don't have to play it on its best settings - it can adapt its level of play to yours - and, more usefully, you can use it to learn how to beat other humans by showing where you're going wrong.

Don't forget to read the help files: there's a lot of impressive things this can do.

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.

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.

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.

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.