The replay viewer

Open any replay (from Watch, your games in the command console, a tournament match, a player profile, or by dropping a .SC2Replay onto the Replays tab's upload strip) and it plays back on a live map canvas: units moving, bases growing, fights resolving, with the full transport bar underneath.

Playback#

Scrub the timeline freely, play at 1x, 2x, 4x, 8x, or 16x, and drive everything from the keyboard: Space to play or pause, arrows to step 5 seconds, Home/End for the ends, number keys for speed. The map rotates (Q/W) and zooms, with R resetting the view; F cycles fog-of-war modes so you can study from both players' combined vision, the selected player's information, or omniscience. The full keymap is in Keyboard shortcuts.

The interface is touch-complete: pan, pinch, scrub, and draw all work on a phone, and the layout reflows under 768px: the match intro stacks, the scoreboard keeps both names and the clock in view, the transport buttons grow to finger size, and a back arrow at the top left leaves the viewer for Watch. The guided tour does not start on its own on a phone (open it from the viewer menu when you want it), and it still greets you on your first desktop visit.

What the canvas shows#

Beyond unit positions: creep spread, building footprints, and the production overlays that make macro legible at a glance. Structures show bubbles for what they are producing, and a townhall flashes when workers idle there, which is the fastest tell for "this is where the game slipped". The supply readout tracks live along the timeline.

Fights get first-class treatment: engagements are detected and marked on the timeline, and clicking a battle opens its breakdown (who lost what, and how decisively). The eval bar (E) runs a win-likelihood readout across the game, useful for finding the swing moments fast.

Where the data comes from (and why quality can differ)#

Two data sources feed playback, and it is worth knowing which you are watching:

• HQ observation: the site runs the actual StarCraft II engine over the replay and records ground-truth unit positions. This is the gold standard, and the pro corpus plus fresh uploads get it via a processing queue.
• Simulator fallback: replays that have not had (or cannot have) the engine pass play back through a parser-driven simulation. Positions are approximate but the build, production, and timing layers are exact.

A brand-new upload may start on the simulator and upgrade to HQ once the queue reaches it. Very new patch versions can lag until the processing fleet supports that build.

Notes, ink, and watching together#

• Notes pin to game time. Hold right-click for the radial (six categories from Highlight to Mistake), or press Ctrl+N to stamp a note at the playhead on your own uploads. Pins render on the timeline so your annotations travel with the replay. See Intel and notes.
• The telestrator draws on the full canvas: tap D to enter draw mode, or hold D to ink while held. Ctrl+Z undoes; S clears your ink.
• Co-watch synchronizes the same replay across a lobby of viewers, ink included, so a coach can draw for the room. Undo only takes back your own strokes, and a viewer who has drawn nothing cannot clear the board, but a clear does wipe everyone's ink for the whole room.

The layers on top#

Playback is the base. Two layers sit above it, each with its own article: the analyst layer (The analyst layer) adds the coaching stack (grades, threat windows, mistake compass, benchmarks, the post-match summary), and the AI coach (The AI coach) opens a chat that can see the game state at your playhead. There is also a Build mode that hands the canvas to the build editor with the replay as reference, covered in The Build tab.