Table of Contents

Using the applets

Pieces populating the chess board of the Interactive Diagram can be moved around by mouse clicks, or (for touch-screen devices) by touching. With the mouse both click-click movement and drag-drop movement can be used. When a piece gets dragged or selected, it will highlight the legal destinations for that piece.

The Diagram will not enforce legality of the moves you make any more than its wooden counterpart would. It also does not enforce turn order; you can move as many white pieces in a row as you want. This makes it easy to set up an arbitrary position. Of course when playing an actual game cheating is discouraged!

When you want to play against the Diagram's AI, you have to open the 'AI bar' by clicking on the underlined words 'Play it!' that are shown beneath the diagram. This will activate the AI, and cause it to make a move with a piece of the opposit color as the one you moved, any time you do move one. Moves done by you or the AI will be collected into a game, the move notation of which will be shown at the bottom of the AI bar. Above that there will be a row of buttons that you can use to step through this game, and recall earlier positions of it in the diagram.

When your move leads to a promotion choice, you must pick the piece from a table that will open below the board (if not already displayed to the right of it.) You will make the choice by clicking on one of the highlighted piece images.

Some variants specify that black can partly set up the starting position. To conveniently do this, the applet for such variants will have a 'Setup' button below the board. Pressing it would clear the area where the pieces have to be set up, and moves those pieces to the center of the board. You can then immediately move those to the empty squares where you want them, which will be recorded as the first few moves of the game. (So do it in the order white, black, white...) On starting a new game (with the 'Restart' button) the applet will randomly shuffle the placeable pieces, as it should do when it is playing black.

Viewing the annotated games

Most variants come with a sample game, and the page with their applet refers to a web page where one can step through the game to recall its positions as a diagram. To this end there is a series of buttons above the board diagram. The meaning of these buttons is:

• |<: move to start position
• <: move to previous position
• >: move to next position
• >|: move to final position
• >>: start autostepping through game until the end is reached

The autostepping can be aborted by pressing any of the other buttons mentioned above. You can also double-click a move in the game history to summon the position after that move.

Comments embedded in the game will be displayed in the area right of the board when the position is reached after the move they apply to. The 'Flip View' button allows you to view the game either from white or black perspective.

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