Beginner friendly chess engine

Flashing cursor sorry

This is the console window you are getting, which awaits UCI commands. That's what you get by running any UCI-compatible chess engine, including Stockfish for example. In order to get the board view you have to use a chess GUI like Fritz (non-free) or Arena (free). There is an option in each of them to add an UCI chess engine, when it gets added, it appears in the list of engines and you can choose it and play against it just like any other engine.

Also, if you downloaded the 'SCE.exe' file from Sourceforge, I recommend that you re-download the 'SCE.zip' file instead. The zip file contains the original executable without any data injected by the Sourceforge website. Here's the link to Arena chess GUI downloads:
http://www.playwitharena.com/?Download

Cheers Alex! Got it working - the default pieces and board in that Arena are awful!

chunkymonkey, nice to hear you got it working. I updated the program to version 1.2. Now you can choose the analysis depth in engine parameters and the default is set to 4. Set depth to 3 for most easy play (and quickest), and to 5 for most difficult play (and slowest). The updated file is named SCE_v1.2.zip and can be downloaded from the same address:
sourceforge.net/projects/scechess/

A little note about the depth setting. If it seems too low, don't be confused by it, because it only affects the main depth, and not capture test depth, and also the evaluation function adds the equivalent of about 1-2 halfmove depth due to its structure.

Great work Alex! Just can't past how bad that Arena interface is. Have you spoken to the moderators here about maybe incorporating your engine as an alternative to stockfish?

If you don't like Arena's GUI you might try 'jose chess database'. It has nice visual styles, including wood and marble, but has not been updated in ages. It still has a number of bugs which makes it freeze with some engines. Here's the link to it:
http://jose-chess.sourceforge.net/
About incorporating my engine into some web UIs, perhaps it needs some optimization to work on servers. For example, it does not currently support multithreading and does not use bitboards. However, I like your idea of interfacing it with a web UI, it can be seen as a way of future elaboration.

Just tested SCE v1.2 with Jose Database and it worked fine. This GUI has one of the widest choice of piece sets and board backgrounds. It may solve your problems for now. Good luck in your chess play!

Version 1.2.1 of the engine is now available in which a small bug was fixed: promotion piece was missing from engine's output, which most GUIs treat as default promotion to Queen.