OK, let me start by saying this. I love FICS. It’s a great way to play chess. You can always find someone to play, it’s free, it’s got some great features. But seriously, what is up with their website!

I am officially extending an open invitation to anyone at FICS: if you want help with a redesign, I’ll do it for free!

You might say “Ollie, it’s a great functional chess server, who cares what their website looks like?”. Well maybe you’d be right. But the way I see it, chess has been margnialized for too long. Let’s face it, when people think of chess, they think of some combination of the following:

• Boring
• Nerdy
• Complicated
• Inaccessible

Well OK, I’m personally at least 3 of the things on that list myself, but nevertheless, the FICS website is implicitly reinforcing all of those bad stereotypes.

I think chess needs to get back to the mainstream. And what better way to do it than an awesome iPhone chess client for FICS! Well that’s what Magnus and I have been working on for the last few months. People with iPhones expect a certain level of polish, and that’s what we’ve been aiming for.

Aesthetic issues with FICS out of the way, I still highly recommend heading over to their website and registering. It’s super easy and quick. Some good reasons to do so include:

1. It’s free! You don’t have to pay a cent.
2. There are heaps of people to play – 300,000 registered users in total and normally over 1,000 every day. That is a lot of people
3. Magnus’s Online Chess connects to FICS so you can play on it anywhere you have your iPhone and a net connection.

Yes, the third point is the really important one