eboard software offers a chess board interface that facilitates both learning and playing of chess. It provides an ideal platform for chess enthusiasts to explore their skills in the game.
At present, eboard supports various protocols and engines, such as Generic XBoard protocol v2-compliant engines, GNU Chess 5, Crafty, and Sjeng. Engine support is available for GNU Chess 4 and Crafty, and links to get them can be found on the eboard site. Although Crafty is not distributed with eboard, the Documentation/Crafty.txt file contains information on its installation and game books.
Direct play across the network is also possible, where one eboard connects to another eboard over a TCP/IP network (like the Internet). eboard also offers support for FICS, allowing players to play regular, suicide, losers, atomic, and crazyhouse chess games. Wild variants are also supported, along with Fischer Random and Wild/5. However, weird castling is not directly supported, and the user may need to enter the move by hand. eboard can also observe and examine games, but the move list may not be retrieved correctly.
Customizable colorization of FICS output is also available, but bsetup mode is not supported by the interface yet (the user can enter bsetup to add pieces with FICS commands). Although simuls are not yet supported, FICS is a free service that has built a large community of chess enthusiasts since 1995. It is a great place to play chess and make friends.
FICS recently introduced thematic games where users don't receive the initial moves but rather an ECO code. These games can be played and watched with eboard, but PGN saving and game browsing are still in development.
This latest eboard release includes text timestamping, non-ASCII character filtering, and improved text searching interface. For users who face problems with firewalls, a third-party TCP port-forwarding tool can be used, such as portfwd(). Additionally, automatic login scripts for FICS can be found in the Documentation/Scripts.txt file.
Overall, eboard is a versatile and reliable software for playing and analyzing chess, with constant updates and improvements.
Version 1.1.1: N/A