Engine Setup

Masterboard ships with Stockfish 17 and auto-detects it at startup. No setup is required to start analysing. This page explains how to verify the engine is running and how to switch to a custom engine.

Checking the active engine

The active engine name is shown at the bottom of the left sidebar. If Stockfish was detected, it will say something like Stockfish 17. If no engine is shown, see Troubleshooting below.

Using a custom UCI engine

Any UCI-compatible engine works with Masterboard — Leela Chess Zero, Komodo Dragon, Stockfish variants, and others.

1. Go to Settings → Engine.
2. Under Custom Engine Path, click Browse.
3. Navigate to the engine binary (.exe on Windows, executable file on macOS/Linux) and select it.
4. Masterboard sends a UCI handshake to validate the binary. If the engine responds correctly, it becomes the active engine.

Caution

If the handshake fails, an error is shown and the previous engine remains active. Check that the binary is a UCI engine and is not already running in another application.

Configuring engine settings

These settings are found in Settings → Engine:

Hash size

The hash (transposition table) is the amount of memory the engine uses to cache previously computed positions. Larger values allow the engine to search deeper without re-computing.

RAM	Suggested hash
8 GB	256 MB
16 GB	512 MB
32 GB+	1024 MB

Threads

The number of CPU threads the engine uses. Setting this higher makes the engine stronger but uses more CPU.

A good rule of thumb: set threads to your number of logical CPU cores minus one, leaving one core for the rest of the system.

MultiPV

The number of candidate lines shown in the Engine panel. Range: 1–5. Higher values show more alternatives but may reduce search depth at each setting. See Reading Results for details on interpreting the output.

Troubleshooting

No engine shown in the sidebar:

• Masterboard looks for Stockfish in (1) an engines/ folder next to the app binary, and (2) the system PATH.
• On Windows: place stockfish.exe in an engines/ folder in the same directory as Masterboard.exe.
• On macOS/Linux: place the Stockfish binary in engines/ next to the app, or install it system-wide via your package manager (brew install stockfish, apt install stockfish, etc.).

Engine stops responding:

• Restart Masterboard. The engine subprocess is restarted automatically on app launch.
• If the problem persists, try increasing the hash size or reducing the thread count in Settings.