Panda Chess Scoreboard — everything you actually need, in the order you'll need it.
Do this once at the start of the day. It is the whole setup.
In this browser, on this laptop. Not in the cloud. That means it survives closing the lid and quitting the browser — but it does not follow you to a different computer, and clearing your browsing data erases it.
Before a big camp week: Settings → Export JSON and keep the file. That's your backup, and it's the only one.
Each student card has three buttons. +5 for winning a game or nailing a hard question, +1 for smaller stuff, -1 to take one back. Scores never go below zero.
Medals 🥇🥈🥉 sort themselves out automatically, and the leader's card glows gold. Ties share a medal.
Settings → Sort Roster Order — high score first (the default), low score first, or alphabetical. Shortcut: double-click the "Student Scoreboard" heading to flip between A–Z and high-score.
The small ✕ on the right of a card. It asks first.
DRAW CHALLENGER — or just tap Space. The board animates, lands on someone, and offers Award 5 Pts right there.
No-Repeat Mode (on by default, in Settings) means nobody gets picked twice until everyone has had a turn. The dots in Settings show who's already been drawn; Reset Pool starts the cycle over.
Every draw is logged with a timestamp under Settings → Session Log Timeline, so you can see who actually participated today.
Teams in the top bar turns on a row of team chips above the roster. Two to start (Pandas and Tigers), up to four.
Click a team's name to rename it. Press Enter or tap away to save. + and − score it. The leading team gets a gold ring.
Team points are completely separate from student points — run both at once. Individual scores for the week, team scores for one afternoon's game.
This is the one worth learning properly.
Hit Freeze and the board stops moving. Scores and the ranking both lock exactly where they are. But scoring keeps working underneath — the points still count, they just don't show.
So you can play a whole final round in front of the class, awarding points the entire time, and nobody knows who won until you say so.
On the iPad, the frozen banner has a 👁 Peek button. It shows you the true live standings on the tablet in your hand only — the TV stays frozen. It marks itself in gold so you can't confuse it with the frozen board, and closes itself after 12 seconds.
A freeze survives a reload, on purpose — a board left frozen on the TV between classes coming back thawed would spoil the reveal it was set up for. Reset Scores or clearing the roster thaws it automatically.
Puts a full scoreboard in your hand so you can walk the room and score from anywhere, while the laptop drives the TV.
The laptop's scoreboard tab has to stay open, and the laptop has to stay awake. The laptop is the actual scoreboard; the iPad is a window onto it.
Close the lid, quit the browser, or let it sleep, and the tablet stops being able to save. It will tell you loudly the moment that happens — see below — but the fix is always the same: wake the laptop and make sure the scoreboard tab is still open.
The bottom bar: Draw, Freeze, Teams, Add. Plus +5/+1/−1 on every card, and team scoring.
Tap Draw and the picked student pops up on the tablet with a one-tap Award 5 Pts — you don't have to be able to see the laptop screen.
Deleting students, resetting scores and clearing the roster stay on the laptop only. That's deliberate: no wiping the week's scores because a tablet got handed to a nine-year-old.
The iPad view is just a web page, and it lays itself out for whatever width it gets. Open the same link in a narrow browser window on the laptop and tile it beside ChessBase — you get the compact scoreboard without a second device.
The room stays the same day to day, so the iPad usually reconnects on its own — leave the tab open, or add it to the home screen. If it looks stuck, click Mirror on the laptop again and re-scan.
TV Mode goes fullscreen, hides the admin buttons, and makes names and scores big enough to read from the back of the room. Teams and the freeze banner scale up too. Esc exits.
For a dim projector or an old classroom TV, also try Settings → Theme → High-Contrast TV.
The status pill in the tablet's top-left corner is the thing to look at. It is never silent about lost points.
| It says | What's true | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Live | Connected. Taps are saving. | Nothing. |
| Not linked | The laptop stopped answering — asleep, tab closed, or off the wifi. Taps are not being saved. | Wake the laptop, check the scoreboard tab is still open. It relinks by itself. |
| Not saving | Your taps went out but the laptop never confirmed them. | Same fix. Re-award anything from the last few seconds once it goes green. |
| Offline | This iPad lost its own connection. | Check the tablet's wifi. |
| No board yet | The laptop hasn't published one. | Click Mirror on the laptop. |
| No room | Opened the mirror link without a room code. | Re-scan the QR. |
The laptop scoreboard keeps working perfectly — it never needed the internet. Only the iPad link does. Score on the laptop until the wifi is back; nothing is lost.
If the numbers look stale, check the pill. Live means it really is current. Anything else means it isn't, and it will say so.
Reload the page. Your scores are in local storage, not in the page — a reload can't lose them. Failing that, Settings → Import JSON and restore your last export.
| Key / action | Does |
|---|---|
| Space | Draw a challenger |
| Esc | Exit TV Mode · close Settings · dismiss the draw pop-up |
| Double-click "Student Scoreboard" | Flip between A–Z and high-score order |
| Click a team's name | Rename it |