Searching a position
“I’ve had this position before.” It’s a middlegame thought, and until now it had no answer: you would have had to remember which game, which tournament, which study. Régence answers it both ways — how many times, and which ones.
The gesture
A search always starts from a position, never from a form. Four paths lead there, depending on where you are.
| From | How |
|---|---|
| From a board | Right-click a player bar (above or below the board) → Search this position |
| From the menu bar | Analysis > Search this position |
| From an invented position | The Configure the position button in a game’s toolbar — place the pieces by hand or paste a FEN, then Search this position |
| From the explorer | The panel’s summary line (“87 games · 5 moves”) becomes a button on the local sources |
The right-click works anywhere a board is being read: a game under analysis as well as a study. It targets the player bars rather than the squares, because on the squares the right-click already draws arrows and highlights — the annotation gesture stays untouched.
What the search finds
Two corpora answer the same question at once: your library games and your studies. In games, variations count as much as the main line; in studies, the entire tree is searched, branches included.
Above all, the search sees transpositions. A transposition is the same position reached through a different move order: 1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 and 1.c4 e6 2.d4 Nf6 end up on the same board. Régence identifies a position by what it is — the pieces, the side to move, the castling rights — not by the path that led there. That is precisely what makes the search useful: it gathers games you would never have connected, because on paper they don’t share an opening.
The “Position” place
The result appears in the game browser, as one more place in the sidebar — above All games, with its count. It is temporary: it exists only while a search is armed, and disappears as soon as it is cleared. A position isn’t a filing cabinet, it’s a question you ask.
Above the table, a summary line shows the diagram of the position being searched — a position can’t be described in words — followed by the counts: “87 games · 3 studies”. Two buttons go with it:
- Edit position… reopens the editor on the current position, to correct it, push it one move further, or paste another one.
- Clear abandons the search and returns to All games.
The studies found appear as chips below the summary, not in the table: the table shows games, and a study isn’t one. A click opens the study at the right node of its tree; a small branch icon signals that the position sits there inside a variation.
Otherwise this place behaves exactly like the others: the toolbar filters, the column sorting, the game preview and the batch actions all work with nothing special to learn. A double-click on a game opens it at the exact move where the position appears, in the right variation — not at move one.
When the position is everywhere
The starting position is in 100 % of your games; after 1.e4 e5, they still count in the hundreds. The Position place counts everything but lists only the first 500 games, in the current sort order — and it says so, in plain words, rather than freezing the interface to prove otherwise:
Very common position — 500 games displayed out of 912. Narrow it down with the filters.
Beyond 200 games found, even with nothing truncated, the banner already invites you to narrow down. The way out is always the same: the toolbar filters — a month, a time control, a result, an opponent’s name — bring the list back to a readable size without changing the question asked.
Two limits worth knowing
The very last position of a game has no occurrence. A position is only recorded if a move departs from it: the final mate, the resignation, the drawn position are therefore not findable. It’s the same rule as in the opening explorer, which answers “what gets played from here” — with no move departing, there is nothing to say.
Online games that haven’t been imported are not searched. The feed from Lichess and chess.com accounts is not indexed; only games saved in the library are. Importing a game brings it into the index, and it becomes findable like the rest.
Coming soon: the online tier
The search currently covers what belongs to you — your games, your studies. One more tier is on its way: the games played from this position elsewhere than at home, those of the masters and those of the Lichess database, in this same place and next to yours. It will require a connected Lichess account, like the online sources of the explorer. The two local corpora will stay fully usable offline and account-free.