XBoard

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:

• Chess engines that will run on your machine and play a game against you or help you analyze, such as GNU Chess, Crafty, or many others.
• Chess servers on the Internet, where you can connect to play chess with people from all over the world, watch other users play, or just hang out and chat.
• Correspondence chess played by electronic mail. The CMail program automates the tasks of parsing email from your opponent, playing his moves out on your board, and mailing your reply move after you've chosen it.

XBoard runs on Unix and Unix-like systems that use the X Window System.

Winboard

The project also includes a port to 32-bit Windows systems called WinBoard.

You can find the download section for Winboard at the Winboard Forum.

Development for Winboard, reporting bugs and any other requests can also be done at the same places as for XBoard (see below).

Downloading XBoard

stable version

The current stable version is: 4.4.2

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).

development version

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:

• A snapshot of the 4.4.3 branch: This will become the next stable version. 4.4.3.20100327. A precompiled version is available for openSUSE.
• A snapshot of the master branch: master-20100327.
  The master branch at this moment also includes changes that will go in future version, but not necessary in the next release. Since this includes lots of changes, chances for major bugs are higher. A precompiled version is available for openSUSE and debian.
• A snapshot of the gtk branch: gtk-20100206.
  In the gtk branch we are working on merging Winboard and Xboard back together using a gtk-frontend. This code doesn't work 100% yet, it will crash quite often, but you can almost play normal games against a machine already. A precompiled version is available for openSUSE.

How to build the development version

git version

After cloning the git-repository, do ./autogen.sh, ./configure and then a make.

tar-balls

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.

archive

You can also find an archive of old versions on the ftp server.

Documentation

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.

Screenshots

These are screenshots taken from version 4.4.0 (click to enlarge).

Links

• XBoard/Winboard
  • Tim's original pages are still available.
  • XBoard can also run engines that use the UCI protocol, with the aid of the Polyglot protocol adapter. A new Polyglot version, (1.4.30b), especially adapted to support the new features of XBoard 4.4.0, can be found here.
• Incomplete list of computer engines that work with XBoard
  • GNU chess
  • Fairy-Max
  • A list with lots of engines
  • List of Xiangqi engines
  • other popular engines are crafty, phalanx, fruit, toga2, glaurung, ...
• Chess server you can connect to using XBoard
  • Free Internet Chess Server (FICS)
  • The Internet Chess Club
• Other interfaces
  • eboard

Frequently Asked Question(FAQ)

If you have any questions, please check out our FAQ.

Mailing Lists and Discussion Forums

mailing lists

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.

discussion forums

A very active forum is the WinBoard Forum (where our current main developer HGM can be found).

Reporting Bugs

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.