My friend keeps asking me for some online chess. I'm supposed to find the soft/page/client myself. It's a jungle. The coolest looking online chess system I found was Babaschess, but I have no idea of how to use this interface to connect two specific people to a game. There is a yahoo chess service but the board and pieces are hideous. There's a lot of other online chess sites, asking for more or less heavy registeration, or just pitting you against random players...

Do you people use a specific free soft/website, to play chess over the internet ? Something that DOES look a bit like a chess board (even if stylised, but classic), that allows two given users to easily find each others, that ideally offers a bit of privacy (some sites seem to impose a public), and that is not necessarily stamp-sized ?

For some reason, her computer doesn't have chess titans. I was also hesitating to simply offer her GoG's chessmaster 9000, but the online function seems to be broken. Would other GoG chess games (there's not enough of them !) be a valid option ?

Bump because i KNOW there are knowledgable geeky chess players on GoG, I just know it I can feel it.

I'm not sure what GoG's chess offerings would be able to do for you, so keep that in mind during this entire response.

Babaschess is, as far as I'm aware, just a client for some other networking type software. What this means is that yo'd need to use some sort of other server or whatnot to actually be able to play chess like this. There's always servers that are available and honestly, one of the easiest ways to do it would be to register accounts on something like FICS (Free Internet Chess Server) at freechess.org and from there you can easily play each other as long as you know each other's username.

In that case, you'd be using Babaschess to connect to each other through the FICS servers. Honestly, that would be one of the better options.

The other option that you have, short of actually just using one of the many Facebook chess games, is chess.com which allows you to challenge people (once you have a free account) and play all the games in the web browser itself. This site is pretty neat and is my main staple at this point. It also hosts tournaments and whatnot which can be fun... and the turns are asynchronous, so you can easily play over a period of several days if you wanted to.

Anyway... hopefully that helps you out!

How about playok.com? Their games are based on java, simplistic, maybe not very pretty but easy to use. And they're obviously planning to switch to html5 judging by couple of new beta versions of games (including chess). It's totally free, creating new account requires only login and password, it's not ad heavy.

Late bump just to thank the people (i hadn't been able to test the suggestions until now). So, thanks people.

(For now, I temporarily use playok, and it's sufficient. Maybe some day I'll switch to the heavier babaschess, but giving instructions online is easier when it's about a minimalist game...)