[](https://travis-ci.org/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfish)
[](https://ci.appveyor.com/project/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfish/branch/master)
-Fairy-Stockfish is a UCI/UCCI/USI/XBoard chess variant engine derived from [Stockfish](https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/) designed for the support of fairy chess variants and easy extensibility with more games. It can play various historical, regional, and modern chess variants as well [games with user-defined rules](https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfish/wiki/Variant-configuration).
+Fairy-Stockfish is a chess variant engine derived from [Stockfish](https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish/) designed for the support of fairy chess variants and easy extensibility with more games. It can play various historical, regional, and modern chess variants as well as [games with user-defined rules](https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfish/wiki/Variant-configuration). For [compatibility with graphical user interfaces](https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfish/wiki/Usage) it supports the UCI, UCCI, USI, and CECP/XBoard protocols.
The goal of the project is to create an engine supporting a large variety of chess-like games, equipped with the powerful search of Stockfish. It is complementary to Stockfish forks more specialized for certain chess variants, such as [multi-variant Stockfish](https://github.com/ddugovic/Stockfish), [Seirawan-Stockfish](https://github.com/ianfab/Seirawan-Stockfish), [Makruk-Stockfish](https://github.com/ianfab/Makruk-Stockfish), etc., supporting many more variants with the tradeoff of slightly lower performance compared to a specialized implementation.
## Supported games
-The games currently supported besides chess are listed below. Fairy-Stockfish can also play user-defined variants loaded via a variant configuration file, see the file `src/variants.ini`.
+The games currently supported besides chess are listed below. Fairy-Stockfish can also play user-defined variants loaded via a variant configuration file, see the file [`src/variants.ini`](https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfish/blob/master/src/variants.ini).
### Regional and historical games
- [Xiangqi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiangqi), [Manchu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchu_chess), [Minixiangqi](http://mlwi.magix.net/bg/minixiangqi.htm)
- [Breakthrough](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_(board_game))
- [Clobber](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clobber)
+## Installation
+You can download [binary releases](https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfish/releases) for Windows and Linux or [compile the program from source](https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfish#compiling-stockfish-yourself-from-the-sources). You probably want to use it together with a GUI, see https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfish/wiki/Usage for recommendations. Or play against it right away online at https://pychess-variants.herokuapp.com/.
+
## UCI parameters
The following UCI options are added or changed compared to official Stockfish:
* #### VariantPath
The path to the configuration file for user-defined variants.
- Alternatively, the "load" command can be used.
+ Alternatively, the [`load`](https://github.com/ianfab/Fairy-Stockfish/wiki/Variant-configuration#loading-variant-configuration) command can be used.
## Help