I recently said that the chess program Rival Chess “suits all of my needs” – I spoke too soon. I hadn’t really taken a look at the program. Not only could I not configure the board/piece colours appropriately, but it wouldn’t remember the settings I’d put in place between games. Perhaps the registered version does, I don’t know.

After even more searching, I finally discovered Soft Chess, which really does meet most of my needs. The graphics are okay by default, it does remember settings from session to session, and it can have its difficulty lowered sufficiently that it’s not impossible for a beginner to win against it.