Chess Branching is a free tool for building and studying opening repertoires. Its one idea: draw the variations as a diagram of connected moves, rather than burying them in brackets inside a paragraph of notation.
Open the boardChess notation was designed for printing a single game on paper. A repertoire is not a single game — it is a tree. Every time your opponent has a real choice, the line splits, and each of those branches splits again. Written in the standard way, that tree gets flattened into one long sentence:
Everything is there, but the shape is gone. You cannot tell at a glance how many replies you have prepared for, where the tree is thin, or which line is your main one. Nested brackets three levels deep are hard to read on paper and worse on a screen.
Chess Branching draws that identical repertoire as a graph. The main line runs straight across; each alternative opens its own row underneath, connected by an arrow:
Now the structure is obvious. Four replies to 1…e5, one of which is your main
line and three of which are short. The branch colours in the diagram match the arrows on
the board, so the moves you have prepared from the current position are visible without
clicking anything.
There is no “add variation” button. Click any move in the diagram to go back to it, play a different move on the board, and a new branch opens. Replay a move that is already in the tree and nothing is duplicated — you simply travel down that branch.
Every move can carry a note: the plan, the trap, the reason you chose this line. Moves that have a note are marked in the diagram, so you can see where your thinking is written down and where it isn’t.
Work is organised into studies — one for each opening, colour, or idea. You can fork a new study from any move, which copies everything below it into a fresh tree. That is useful when a sideline grows big enough to deserve its own file.
Import any PGN with variations and comments and it becomes a diagram. Export it back and you get standard PGN that opens in any other chess program. Nothing you build here is locked in.
Studies are saved in your own browser and never sent anywhere. That means there is no account to create and nothing of yours sits on a server — but it also means your studies do not follow you to another browser or device, and clearing your browsing data will remove them. Use export PGN to keep a copy of anything you care about.
It is free, it needs no sign-up, and it works offline once the page has loaded.
Open the board