XBoard

XBoard is a graphical user interface for chess in all its majorforms, including international chess, xiangqi (Chinese chess),shogi (Japanese chess) and Makruk, in addition to many minor variants such asLosers Chess, Crazyhouse, Chess960 and Capablanca Chess. It displays achessboard on the screen, accepts moves made with the mouse, and loadsand saves games in Portable Game Notation (PGN). It serves as afront-end for many different chess services, including:

Chess engines that will run on your machine and play a game againstyou or help you analyze, such as GNU Chess, Crafty, or manyothers.
Chess servers on the Internet, where you can connect to play chesswith people from all over the world, watch other users play, or justhang out and chat.
Correspondence chess played by electronic mail. The CMail programautomates the tasks of parsing email from your opponent, playing hismoves out on your board, and mailing your reply move after you'vechosen it.

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

XBoard GTK build, playing some Chess variant

WinBoard, configured with marble board

More...

WinBoard (MS Windows port)
Downloading
Documentation
On-line User Guide
More Screenshots
What's New in 4.9.0? (stable)
What's New in 4.8.0?
What's New in 4.7.3?
What's New in 4.7.2?
What's New in 4.7.1?
What's New in 4.7.0?
What's New in 4.6.2?
What's New in 4.6.1? (faulty)
What's New in 4.6.0?
What's New in 4.5.3?
What's New in 4.5.2?
What's New in 4.5.1?
What's New in 4.5.0?
What's New in 4.4.x?
How can you help us?
Frequently Asked Questions

WinBoard

The project also includes a port to Microsoft Windows systems calledWinBoard.

You can find the downloads for binaries and preconfigured installer packages of WinBoard atHGM's download page.Also see HGM's web page.

Downloading XBoard

Stable version (4.9.0)

Sources of the current stable version are available from the main GNUdownload server(HTTPS,HTTP,FTP) and itsmirrors; pleaseuse a mirror if possible.

Precompiled versions are availablefor openSUSEand Debian(if you know of other distribution that package it, please let usknow).

Mac OS X Intel 10.6+ App

Development version

For information about development, please seethe XBoard projectpage at savannah.gnu.org.

We regularly do so-called "developer releases", which includethe newest and the latest we are working on.If you want to help us test, or just want to use thenew features, you might prefer to use those over the stable version.

At the Open Build Server we provide packages that can be installed in parallelto the normal xboard version. To do this the programs are renamed toxboardnext (latest from the v4.9.x branch in Git) and xboardgit (latestversion from the master branch in Git). Packages are available for:Debian6.0, Fedora17/18, RedHat RHEL 6,openSUSE 12.1/12.2/12.3/Tumbleweed/Factory, CentOS6, Arch,Ubuntu10.04/12.04/12.10. These packages are generated automaticallyand are for testing purposes only. Please let us know if you have anyproblems related to XBoard or package dependencies.

Windows builds of development versions can often be found at HGM's web page.

Furthermore we provide development versions (tagged commits in Git):

a snapshot of the master branch: master-20140119;
no developer release at the moment.

How to build the development version

Git version

The Gitrepository is on Savannah. All branches can be viewed on its webinterface, which also provides tarballs of all tagged versions. Thesetarballs are different from the ones that you can download from the GNU server, and you willneed to run ./autogen.sh on them as described below.

If you want to get a copy of the repository, you can clone it using the following command:

git clone https://git.savannah.gnu.org/r/xboard.git

For more information on how to use Git, please visit the Git home page.

After cloning the Git repository or downloading and unpacking a snapshottarball from the Git repository,run ./autogen.sh, ./configure, and then makeand make install.

Tarballs from the download server

Unpack the tarball and do ./configure followed bymake and make install.

Documentation

The official manual page for XBoard is available online,as is documentation for most GNU software.This discusses every feature XBoard has in detail.You may also find this information on your local system byrunning infoxboard or manxboard, or bylooking at /usr/doc/xboard/,/usr/local/doc/xboard/, or similar directories on your system.

There now also exists an XBoard UserGuide, which only presents the main features in a more pedestrian way.This would be an excellent starting point if you are a novice XBoard user.If you have prior experience with XBoard, but just want to know what newfeatures have been added since the version you were used to,the pages in the What's New section wouldbe the place to go.

A description of the Chess Engine CommunicationProtocol used by XBoard to communicate with Chess Engines is also available.

Screenshots

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

Help needed

It would be great if people would like to help in the developing processWe can use all kinds of help, from people who just use the software and havea feature request (send them to developer mailing list), to people who canupdate/check the documentation and especially people who test developmentversions (send problems to the developer mailing list).Have a look at the following list in case you are interested:

Admin

A new project admin is needed. The person would manage the Savannahpages, membership to Savannah/Git access, do releases, and manage the emaillist, etc. The job could also be split among several people.

Translators

We added support for different languages to XBoard and need people totranslate it. The translation is handled by the translationproject. You can check on the current statusand how to join the translation project.

Testers

We are always looking for people who are willing to test the latest newfeatures and give us feedback or new ideas. If you are interested, pleasesend an email to our list at <xboard-devel@gnu.org> or just tryout the program and reports bugs either to the email list or to the bugtracker (see below for links).

GTK developer needed

We are also working on merging WinBoard and XBoard back into one versionusing a cross platform GTK-front end. This will help us clean up the codeand make things like internationalization easier. We made some progress, ifyou know want to help out there are still lots of things waiting to be done.Email the mailing list for moreinformation. There is already some unmerged code to port to GTK3.

Update the help files

The help files for Xboard and WinBoard could be merged into one document.

Update the webpage

The content of the webpage could be updated with screenshots fromthe latest version. We also have a new tutorial that could beintegrated.

Frequently Asked Question (FAQ)

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

Mailing Lists

XBoard has two mailing lists:

<xboard-devel@gnu.org> (web interface) for discussing most aspects of XBoard, including development and enhancement requests;
<bug-xboard@gnu.org> (web interface) for reporting bugs.

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 emptymail with a Subject: header of just "subscribe" to therelevant -request list. For example, to subscribe yourself to theGNU announcement list, you would send mail to <info-gnu-request@gnu.org>.Or you can use the mailing list webinterface.

Reporting Bugs and Requesting New Features

If you think you found a bug, please check the bugtracker for openand already closed bugs. If you found a new bug, please, file a bug reporteither 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 avolunteer effort; you too can contribute. For information, pleaseread How to help GNU.

Licensing

XBoardis free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under theterms of the GNU General Public License as published by the FreeSoftware Foundation; either version3 of the License, or (at youroption) any later version.

XBoard - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation (2024)