Hi, I'm not a great player, but I thoroughly enjoy going over games and annotating them, finding things that I didn't see during the game and trying to construct the overall story of the game. I also play often play against friends who are weaker players and they ask me sometimes to share my analysis of the game. I use RHP's annotation features, but I would also like to find a good third party program which would allow me to easily write and view PGN annotations including variations (preferably allowing nested variations). Being able to insert a diagram into the comments would be awesome, but just being able to view the board position within a nested variation would be sufficient. If you know of such a program, I'd greatly appreciate it if you could share. I guess another requirement is that it be free, since I'm not sure my friends would be willing to spring for a piece of software just so they could see my scribblings 🙂 Thanks so much in advance!

I like BabasChess for online games. I believe it could also be used for the purposes you describe. See
www.babaschess.net

These are real life friends?If so,what's wrong with verbal analysis?Or pen and paper if they want to take it home.

These are real life friends, but they live in various parts of the country. I do some verbal analysis, but I'd like a tool which makes it easy to see board positions in variations. For most of my friends, chess notation takes enough effort to interpret that they can't really picture what the whole board would look like after a written move sequence (this is true for me too after a few moves), and I like to look at a few possible moves from the same position frequently enough that I'd like people to just be able to see it played out without struggling with the notation.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll definitely check out BabasChess!

Originally posted by mikebind
Hi, I'm not a great player, but I thoroughly enjoy going over games and annotating them, finding things that I didn't see during the game and trying to construct the overall story of the game. I also play often play against friends who are weaker players and they ask me sometimes to share my analysis of the game. I use RHP's annotation features, but I woul ...[text shortened]... or a piece of software just so they could see my scribblings 🙂 Thanks so much in advance!

Thanks, I'll check that out too!