![[screenshot normal game]](graphics/xboard-4.4.0.png)
XBoard is a graphical user interface for chess in all its major forms, including international chess, xiangqi (Chinese chess), shogi (Japanese chess) and Makruk, 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.
You can find the download section for the stable version of Winboard at the Winboard Forum or try the link to a beta-version in the download section.
Development for Winboard, reporting bugs and any other requests can also be done at the same places as for XBoard (see below).
Starting from 4.5.0 we will summarize the latest changes at these webpages. You can also find information about the next upcoming release here. Have a look, try it out (download links below) and let us know what you think.
We can always need more people to help out with XBoard/Winboard. Have a look at the following list in case you are interested:
We are always looking for people who are willing to test the latest new features and give us feedback or new ideas. If you are interested, please send an email to our list at <xboard-devel@gnu.org> or just try out the program and reports bugs either to the email list or to the bug-tracker (see below for links).
We are also working on merging Winboard and XBoard back into one version using a cross platform GTK-front end. This will help us clean up the code and make things like internationalization easier. Progress is slow though, so if you know want to help out there are lots of things waiting to be done. Email the mailing list for more information.
A sort of match mode where one engine automatically does a number of 'games', (using a position file filled with EPDs as starting positions), except that each 'game' lasts only for one move, and the 'result' is then computed by XBoard depending on if this move was the correct solution specified in the EPD.
Implement a slave mode where XBoard forks itself, connecting a pipe between what normally would be the ICS socket of the child, and a new output channel of the parent, so that the parent can forward board and move lists belonging to a specific game to the slave dedicated to display it.
A tricky issue, because in the current code initializing the engine is intertwined with initializing XBoard. And the whole idea is to be able to switch engine without losing your current settings or indeed your current game. So it will require some good thought about which options need to be reset (like -fd, for sure), and which should be kept.
Currently XBoard supports only two-player matches. If run-time changing of the engine becomes possible, it wold be nice if people could also perform automatic round-robins or gauntlets between a group of engines.
Currently XBoard just displays what the engine prints for PV in its thinking output literally. Which often means long algebraic. It would be nice if the user can choose the display format, so it can be SAN or even some other format (e.g. descriptive notation or some specific Xangqi or Shogi format), possibly through invoking an external processor.
The documentation could need some updates. In our effort to merge Winboard and XBoard back together, we also want to merge the RTF file back into the XBoard texinfo file. This will take some effort though, since the two versions still differ in several areas and this would need to be highlighted. The benefit would be though that we could prepare a much better and up to date Windows documentation.
The content of the webpage could be updated with screenshots from the latest version. We also have a new tutorial that could be integrated. The webpage should also be integrated with git, so that all developers have access to it.
The current stable version is: 4.5.1
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).
It can also be found on one of the mirrors of ftp.gnu.org; please use a mirror if possible.
Precompiled versions are available for openSUSE and debian-squeeze (if you know of other distribution that package it, please let us know).
It would be great if people would like to help in the developing process. We can use all kinds of help, from people who just use the software and have a feature request (send them to developer mailing list), to people who can update/check the documentation and especially people who test development versions (send problems to the developer mailing list).
At the moment we have three developer versions:
After cloning the git-repository, do ./autogen.sh, ./configure and then a make.
Unpack the tar ball and do ./configure followed by make.
For development sources and other information, please see the XBoard project page at savannah.gnu.org.
A snapshot of the latest source code for all branches is available at the git repository on Savannah.
You can also find an archive of old versions on the ftp server.
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.
The Chess Engine Communication Protocol can be found here.
These are screenshots taken from version 4.4.0 (click to enlarge).
![[screenshot bughouse game]](graphics/xboard-4.4.0-variant.png)
![[screenshot bughouse game]](graphics/xboard-4.4.0-showgi.png)
![[screenshot bughouse game]](graphics/xboard-4.4.0-petite.png)
![[screenshot bughouse game]](graphics/xboard-4.4.0-XQ.png)
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.
For feature requests, please use our mailinglist: <xboard-devel@gnu.org>.
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.