One of the most confusing aspects of BSW can be all the pictures and symbols on the screen. So lets examine all those pictures and symbols.

When you first connect to Brettspielwelt, you will be prompted for a username and password. After you correctly type in your userid and password, you will be presented with one of more windows, depending on your experience level on Brettspielwelt.

If you are new, you will see the newbie help screen

This screen gives you several options to click on, you can also close this window by clicking on the X.

You will also see the main gaming window

In the middle of this window, you'll see a picture of the town you are in. Many of the buildings you see contain games. You can enter those buildings by clicking on them, if you wish. You can also scroll the town view,by clicking one of the 4 navigation arrows on the right side. You can return to the town center by clicking in the middle of the 4 arrows. At the top of the screen, you'll see the name of the Town's Mayor and at the bottom, the names of the players that make up the town council.

At the top you'll have a menu bar, which you can click on for various commands. If you are using the Brettspielwelt client, you can customize those menu items by editing your .prop file

At the very bottom of the screen is the command line, where you type commands or messages that can be seen by the other players in the room. You can get a list of the players in the same room as you, by typing the command /who or by looking at the player list window. The player list window can be closed by clicking the small pink button at the top of that window.

Later on you can open the player window by using the blue tool bar at the bottom of the screen. To open the tool bar, just on the small blue button in the lower left.

Clicking on that expands the tool bar

To open any of the tools, just click on the proper icon.

The tools are:

• Yell Tool - This tool always you turn on and off yells
• FiveDice - This is a single player game.
• WechselFieber - This is a single player game.
• WorldMap - Brings up a clickable BSW worldmap showing all the towns.
• BlackBox - Anothe Single Player game.
• Channel Tool - Shows a list of all the public chat channels.
• Help - Online help(it's in German).
• Close - Closes the toolbar.
• Solo Game Results - Brings up a window that shows all solo game results from games played in the same room as you.
• Screen Size - This tools allows you to resize your screen to several standard sizes.
• Game Tool - Tool for joining, setting options and starting games.
• Info Tool - Shows information about a player. Use the /info player command first.
• Game Partner(SPV) - Very complex tool for finding game players, covered in detail in the "finding games" section of this tutorial.
• Player List - Shows all the players in the same room as you.

One more screen you many see, is the Game Manager screen. You can get to the game manager by the command /manager. Then just click on "alle" and click on the game you are interested in. You'll be shown a list of rooms for that game.

If you see people standing next to a table, that means that have already joined the game. If you see a player to the right of the table, that means they are in the room, but have not joined the game yet. If the game name line begins with an * It means the game has already started. If they game allows options you will see the options in effect for that game.