![]() ![]() It supports locust captures of up to two additional victims.īuilt-in piece images of XBoard WinBoard only has those on blue background. ![]() Including those with bent or bifurcating trajectories. (through the 'a' = 'again' modifier of the XBetza extension), It also supports arbitrary lame leapers and multi-hoppers, This does support the usual leapers, sliders and hoppers,Īs well as their divergent versions through separately specifying moves and captures. Some of these have a standard move programmed for them,īut the move of all pieces can be (re-)defined by user or engine through providing a move description in (extended) Betza notation. The engine will then provide all the information WinBoard needs to play that variant.Īmongst the variants currently supported by WinBoard are:Ĭrazyhouse (displaying the piece holdings) The engine can announce it can play a variant WinBoard has never heard of,Īnd when the user selects that variant from the WinBoard menus, The engine can provide this information to WinBoard without any user involvement. When WinBoard is run with an engine, however, These instructions can be collected in a settings file, The user can alter the board size, specify which of the 66 pieces should participate, provide an initial setup and specify how the pieces should move, thus modifying one of the standard variants into his own. XBoard supports 66 piece types, with the possibility to provide external image files for each of them, although many (in XBoard actually all) of them have pre-defined images, and a predefined notion of how they should move. There are many additional variants it can play through user configuration. Xiangqi (left) and Courier Chess (above) in board size 'petite'Īpart from the 33 Chess variants for which WinBoard has pre-programmed rules, To play variants with almost arbitrary rules. There even exist engines that can be configured by the user Many of these engines play Chess variants, WinBoard started its live as a GUI for GNU Chess, but by now there are many hundreds of Chess engines that support WinBoard protocol. (It does know the rules of some 33 Chess variants even without the aid of an enginem, though, and uses this knowledge to reject illegal moves, or indicate where a 'picked up' piece can move to.) For playing a game it is dependent on engines, which are fully independent programs communicating with it in text mode, through a bi-directional stream of commands, collectively known as the WinBoard protocol. Note that a GUI is a passive tool, the software equivalent of a Chess board, and does not implement any game-playing ability itself. It provides the functionality of displaying the game and stepping through it, saving and loading the game as PGN file, saving and loading game positions as FENs, and acting as arbiter between the playing entities (checking moves for legality, adjudicating games that are theoretical draws,etc.) The GUI acts as an interface between a Human player and an AI (referred to as 'engine'), between two engines, between a Human and an internet Chess Server (ICS), or an engine and an ICS. It can run on Linux and Mac OSX (XBoard) and MS Windows (WinBoard). WinBoard / XBoard is a popular open-source Graphical User Interfaces (GUI), which allows you to display Chess games on your PC. Check out Gross Chess, our featured variant for June, 2023. ![]()
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