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Two players ("red" and "green" take their turns on a 6x6 board. In the beginning the board is empty except for a red "1" in the upper left and a green "1" in the lower right.

Making a turn means setting one field of the board. Setting a field makes it assume the sum of the points of the 8 surrounding fields. But there is a catch: If the field is of the opponent's color, their score is subtracted rather than added. If the resulting score is positive, the field will get your color, else your opponent's color. The same happens to the global score, which is just a colored difference of the score of all fields on the board. If the score in the end is red, red wins. If it is green, green wins. If it is black (0), it is a draw.

License: free

Lasca is a game similar to Draughts but with some really cool enhancements. In a future release you'll find a great description in the help system of Ascal. In the meantime the article on Wikipedia will help you understanding the rules. Ascal tries to give a great Gnome experience of Lasca for one and two players. You can undo moves, save and load games and all that on a nifty graphical board.

License: free

Additional System Requirements: Gnome

A clone of Ataxx. A little like Othello, you can move your piece and convert enemys to your coulour, the winner is the one which has the most piece of his color on the board. Now the game is cuter.

License: free

Additional System Requirements: SDL

This is an implementation of an African board game reminiscent of Mancala. The board contains twelve holes, each containing some number of stones. The object is to capture your opponent's stones by moving stones around according to the rules. I found the interface to be a bit buggy.

License: free

Additional System Requirements:

• X11, color display (8 or 24 bits)
• Tcl version 7.4 / Tk version 4.0
• ANSI-C compiler

BabyChess is a chess application. It understands PGN (Portable Game Notation) and FEN (Forsyth-Edwards Notation). It also lets you play chess against other people through ICS (Internet Chess Server) or against its built-in chess engine.

License: free

Additional System Requirements:
GTK+ 2.0
LibPNG
GCC
GnomeUI
Probably GNU LibC

BGBlitz is a program intended to be the ultimate in Backgammon software. It hosts strong Backgammon playing Bots, training aids, tools to analyze matches and any further features which are requested.

The current release version 1.0 has the following features:

• A neural net, called TachiAI, which has learned to play worldclass Backgammon. For beginners there are also weaker levels available.
• You can set your opponent to be human (useful for entering matches from books, etc.), network (to play against someone over TCP/IP) or TachiAI (the computer opponent). In the release 1.0 there's just one computer opponent, TachiAI. BGBlitz is designed to be able to host several bots and in the future there will be additional computer opponents.
• You can play Backgammon or Nackgammon (a variant leading to more complex games)
• Select your language between German and English. Other languages will follow, if there's demand.
• You can train yourself with difficult positions from the quiz databases. You can download databases from the BGBlitz website or create your own.
• You can analyze (best moves, evaluation, cube action) any position at any time, save positions and continue playing from a saved position.
• BGBlitz has a calculator included which computes the important parameters for cube handling in matchplay, a useful aid in improving your cube decisions. You can choose from three popular match equity tables as the basis for the calculations.
• You can replay, analyze and annotate your matches with BGBlitz or matches from many other sources such as FIBS, GamesGrid, etc...
• You can collect matches in databases and select specific games (e.g. all matches from your next opponent in a tournament). Additionally you can calculate statistics, such as which openings are played and how successful they are.
• There are a lot of formats for matches. With BGBlitz you can read many of them and convert to some other match-formats.
• You can read logfiles from FIBS/W and MacFIBS with BGBlitz, so you can analyze your online games later.
• With the included endgame-database you have very precise winning probabilities available and can improve your endgame play.
• You can have a customized appearance and a wide range of settings in BGBlitz to your own personal taste.
• You can copy a character representation of the current position to the clipboard. This is useful for sending positions in an email or newsgroup postings.
• To prove that TachiAI doesn't cheat, you have full control of the initial value of the random number generator.
• For the evaluation of long races, you can calculate the Kleinman count.

  BGBlitz 1.0.5 has played on the 7th Computer Olympiad and won the Backgammon tournament. The matches are here.

  License: commercial ($23 to $46 (free eval version available))
  
  Additional System Requirements:

  • Java >=1.1