gcboard (Generic Chess Board) is an easy to use gameboard API for Chess-style games (i.e. Draughts, Shogi, Xiangqi, Checkers, Chess, and variants). It implements most of the expected features (dragging, highlighting, animating, flashing, ...), and handles them transparently for the programmer. Gcboard will support your game if it has the following properties:

• The game is turn based (from 2 to 15 players).
• Pieces are put on one or more rectangular grids (typically one).
• Moves are made by moving a piece from it's square to another (either empty or containing an enemy piece).

gcboard is platform independent. The core of the library is written in (hopefully) portable C. Supporting new platforms and toolkits should be very easy: only create a wrapper around the independent code. Currently there is only a gtk+ widget. A wxWindows version will follow soon. Any contributions to support other toolkits and platforms are welkom! (i.e. MS Windows, Qt, Mac Os)

gcboard is especially optimized to be used with interpreted languages, such as ruby, scheme, python and perl. Most of the cpu-intensive features are already implemented, so you can write your program in your favorite language, instead of having to write it in C. There are already bindings for ruby, and I would gladly accept contributions for other bindings.

The reason that I wrote this library is that other people can produce beautiful games, without much effort. Instead of having to write a full interface each time from scratch, it is now possible to concentrate on the game-specific parts.

gcboard is released under the General Public Licence. Basicly this means that you are free to use and modify this library as long as you also release the sources to your program. (Note: this is not the LGPL license, it doesn't permit linking (either staticaly or dynamicaly) with closed source programs.

I would really like to hear your opinion about gcboard, or requests of new features. If you know a feature or enhancement that is generally usefull I will probably add it.

Gcboard is developed by Kristof Bastiaensen and hosted by Sourceforge. You can find the project page here.