Chess software

Does anyone know of any free software to make engines play games against each other, rather than analyse?

Sure.

Arena 3.5 will run tournaments between engines.

I've only done it once, so I've forgotten the details, but I remember it is straightforward:

Its not working.

It says that lpng.dll is missing.

It should be working. Did you get the download from the official site?

http://www.playwitharena.com/?Download

Lucas Chess does it and it's easier to do.  You can even make tournaments with whatever engines you would like to use like Arena, just much easier imo.  I loathe Arena because it's interface is a disaster and it's buggy.

Fritz also plays multi engines against each other....

Please, don't hold back. How do you REALLY feel about Arena?

it is poopy

I downloaded arena 3.5.1. It is working now. In fact, I am currently running a tournament. I think the interface is fine.

I like Arena's interface better than that of Lucas Chess. However, I will admit that Arena does have some significant bugs, and Arena's developers do have a reputation for being slow to fix bugs. You just have to learn what the bugs are in Arena and either work around them or use another interface if you can't work around them.

I haven't really used LC's tournament feature much, so I can't give an opinion on it. I do know that LC's developer is very active and probably is much faster at squashing bugs.

Anoother GUI that's sometimes used for engine tournaments is ChessGUI.

http://www.chess.hylogic.de/

https://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/ChessGUI

Of course, ChessGUI has it's own quirks, and development on the GUI may have stopped. Documentation for the GUI is not the best, so you might often find yourself asking questions or having to experiment to find out how a feature works. Once you get it lined out and working, it tends to run more stably than Arena.

I would bet someone unfamiliar with both programs could run an engine tournament more easily in Lucas Chess than Arena.

I had never actually done it before and had one up and running in less than a minute.  Arena is a nightmare compared to that.

OK, I'm trying to install an external engine into Lucas Chess. The engine uses Nalimov tablebases. The engine configuration window allows you to choose the Nalimov tablebases and specify an EGTB cache size, but I see no way to tell Lucas Chess the path to the Nalimov files. I've searched through all of the docs I can find, and I've searched through all of the menus that seem to be relevant. How do I tell the engine and Lucas Chess where to find the Nalimov EGTBs?

Maybe it uses online tablebases?

I'm sorry I know nothing about tablebases.  I was not offering tech support for Lucas Chess.  Simply trying to help a user find the easiest way to run an engine tournament.  Maybe start a different thread?

Also, you could drop a note to Lucas who is very responsive on his blog.  Here is the link http://lucaschess.blogspot.com/

So, I guess it's not so easy to start an engine tournament in Lucas Chess after all.

I just downloaded Arena. It played a Sicilian Dragon against my 1. e4 and played a line I'd never seen before (and I studied the Dragon extensively before giving it up). I played a classic Yugoslav Attack, and using this strange new line (...Nbd6...Nc5 to attack the Bishop on B3, and later positioning ...Qd2), it completely shut down my attack. Now I want to explore this line further, as I'm pretty familiar wtih the Dragon. I scribbled down the moves for later study.

I seriously doubt it. That means you'd have to be connected to the internet when running tournaments that use tablebases. Plus, the constant accessing of the tablebase files over an internet connection would slow down the engine's search to an unacceptable degree.

I'm beginning to wonder if Lucas Chess even supports tablebases.

Oh wait. I just noticed on the Lucas Chess home page that Lucas Chess only supports UCI engines? So it doesn't even support Winboard engines? Wow, completely unacceptable in my book.

From my perspective, I'd say that Lucas Chess is the poopy one, at least when it comes to engine tournaments.

Oops!

It's extremely easy to start an engine tournament.  I started one in less than a minute, as I said.  But, I can see this seems to be a very personal issue for you, so I will leave it at that.  Have a good day.