XBoard is a graphical user interface for chess in all its major forms, including international chess, xiangqi (Chinese chess) and shogi (Japanese chess), in addition to many minor variants such as Losers Chess, Crazyhouse, Chess960 and Capabanca Chess. It displays a chessboard on the screen, accepts moves made with the mouse, and loads and saves games in Portable Game Notation (PGN). It serves as a front-end for many different chess services, including:
XBoard runs on Unix and Unix-like systems that use the X Window System.
The project also includes a port to 32-bit Windows systems called WinBoard.
Development for Winboard as well as downloading it, reporting bugs and any other requests can be done at the same places as for XBoard.
The current stable version is: 4.4.0
It can be found on the main GNU ftp server: http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/xboard/ (via http) and ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/xboard/ (via ftp).
The bare Winboard binaries can also be found at those locations in the winboard directory (http,ftp). An installer package for Windows together with several engines and other useful files can be found at the Winboard forum.
It can also be found on one of the mirrors of ftp.gnu.org; please use a mirror if possible.
Current unstable version: see git repository.
For development sources and other information, please see the XBoard project page at savannah.gnu.org.
A snapshot of the latest source code is available at the git repository on Savannah.
Documentation for XBoard is available online, as is documentation for most GNU software. You may also find more information about XBoard by running info xboard or man xboard, or by looking at /usr/doc/xboard/, /usr/local/doc/xboard/, or similar directories on your system.
These are screenshots taken from version 4.4.0 (click to enlarge).
If you have any questions, please check out our FAQ.
XBoard has two mailing lists: <bug-xboard@gnu.org> and <xboard-devel@gnu.org>.
The main discussion list is <xboard-devel@gnu.org>, and is used to discuss most aspects of XBoard, including development and enhancement requests. Please send bug reports to <bug-xboard@gnu.org>.
Announcements about XBoard and most other GNU software are made on <info-gnu@gnu.org>.
To subscribe to these or any GNU mailing lists, please send an empty mail with a Subject: header of just subscribe to the relevant -request list. For example, to subscribe yourself to the GNU announcement list, you would send mail to <info-gnu-request@gnu.org>. Or you can use the mailing list web interface.
A very active forum is the WinBoard Forum (where our current main developer HGM can be found).
If you think you found a bug, please check the bugtracker for open and already closed bugs. If you found a new bug, please, file a bug-report either via our bug-related email list or in the bugtracker.
Please remember that development of XBoard, and GNU in general, is a volunteer effort, and you also can contribute. For information, please read How to help GNU.