In fact Winboard works more as a graphic front-end for several different chess engines included with the game, as well as for several chess game modes. These include not only player vs player or human vs computer competitions, but also games played online and even by email. WinBoard also lets you save games at any moment and resume them exactly at the same point where you left them, and review previous games as a way to remember good movements or learn new techniques.
As for graphics, WinBoard is quite simple. The chess board is just a squared 2D window with flat pieces – no three dimensions or shadow effects. Well, at least you can customize the board's size and colors in the program's options menu.
Despite its graphical simplicity, WinBoard is a good choice for all chess fans who want to practice this ancient game, either against the PC or in online competitions.
Pros
Different playing modes, including online and email games
WinBoard is simply a graphical user interface for chess. It displays a chessboard on the screen, accepts moves made with the mouse, and loads and save games in Portable Game Notation (PGN). It serves as front-ends 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. A list of compatible engines is available.
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. A list of compatible servers is available.
Correspondence chess played by electronic mail. The CMail program (which works with XBoard only) 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.
PGN viewer. You can use XBoard or WinBoard as a viewer and creator for game files recorded in PGN (standard chess notation).
Whatever dev ruined this.. In ver 4.2, you could scroll through a game with the arrow keys. Some f'ing tool thought that was too intuitive and effortless, and required alt+arrow. Whoever decided this needs to be beaten. To "upgrade" a version by ruining the interface AND add all sorts of bloatware is not an upgrade, esp when you claim GNU. F whatever developer ruined this once simple app that just did what you needed without frills, and changed it to opt-out. Cons: lose the require alt+arrow, revert to better arrow-only navbloatware that you have to opt out of to avoid
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