Board Editor

Not every position worth looking at comes from a page on this site. Sometimes it's a puzzle from a book, something you half-remember from a game you lost last week, or a 'what if' idea you want to see on a real board instead of imagining it. The board editor is built for that: a blank canvas rather than a fixed example.

Placing pieces on the board

Start from an empty board or the standard starting position, and place any piece on any square by hand. There's no requirement that the result be a position that could actually arise from legal play — you're free to set up a study position, a puzzle, or a deliberately unrealistic scenario, whatever you're trying to explore.

Sharing what you build

Once you've set up a position, it can be shared through a single URL that encodes the exact placement of every piece. Send that link to someone else, and they see precisely the position you built the moment they open it — no re-entering pieces by hand, no ambiguity about which square anything sits on. It also works as a way to keep a position for yourself: bookmark the link and it stays exactly as you left it, since the position is carried in the link itself rather than saved to an account.

What it's for, and what it isn't

This is a setup and sharing tool, not an analysis tool. It won't tell you whether a position is winning, suggest a move, or verify that a position could occur in a real game — it places pieces where you put them and gives you a way to hand that exact arrangement to someone else. If you're trying to recreate a position to think through carefully yourself, that's exactly the intended use; if you're looking for an assessment of who stands better, that's a different kind of tool than this one.

Common ways people use it

Setting up a tactical puzzle you saw somewhere else so you can study it properly rather than squinting at a small diagram. Recreating the exact position from a game you just played, right after a loss, while the moves are still fresh enough to reconstruct accurately. Testing a structural idea — what if this pawn were on a different square, what if this piece had gone somewhere else — that doesn't correspond to any specific named opening or endgame covered elsewhere on the site. If what you actually want is a worked example rather than a blank canvas, the openings section and endgames section already have positions built and explained for you.