When you find the onscreen game board which you can play through games onscreen, here are a few notes to get the most out of this simple device.
First thing to notice is that when you are viewing on a PC, hovering the mouse pointer over a square on the board, in many cases a tool tip will popup as the squares on the board are also buttons for various functions. Otherwise, only the co-ordinates of the square will show.
Flip board: Players often like to play through games from the viewpoint of the winner. In the onscreen games viewer you can do this, as follows:
Click on the square e7 (with White at the bottom) and the board will switch to showing Black at the bottom. To flip back, click the same square (now d2). However, the names of the players showing one above the other, will not change places, which can be confusing. For that reason, we show (White) and (Black) after the players names, to make it clear who’s who.
Play through variations: The board is not just for playing through the game moves, but also allows playing through variations in the notes. These “live” variations are those given between square brackets like [ … ]. Moves given in ordinary text comment are not “live” and such comments may be included within live variations, so you have to look carefully to see which is which. The easy way to tell is simply to click on a move in a note to see if it’s live or not. To return to the game moves, simply click on the last game move, those in bold.
Some of the tool tips are only of use with a large database of games. Discover for yourself.