Comments by FergusDuniho

The fairychess include file is not a drop-in replacement for chess2. It introduces new paradigms on how to program a preset. One major difference is in the names of functions and subroutines. Instead of naming them after piece labels, they are now named after piece codenames. The tutorial gives details on this. I would recommend starting with a preset that already works with the fairychess include file and adapting it to work with your game.

Gross chess works fine for that. I can't see where is what I miss for Devingt.

You are using the chess2 include file instead of the fairychess include file. You should switch to the fairychess include file, because it is more up-to-date, and the new subroutines I mentioned to you are in that include file. To learn about what makes it different, you should check out the tutorial on the fairychess include file.

en-passant: a pawn on 7 should be able to take en-passant an opposed pawn that had moved 3 sq.

This is handled in the preset for Gross Chess. The Pawn functions and subroutines in the fairychess include file should handle it automatically if you set fps to 3.

promotion: only for captured pieces, a pawn on 9 cannot step on 10 if no piece is available.

The preset for Eurasian Chess can handle this. In the Pre-Move sections, it sets a value for wprom or bprom that is based on the currently captured pieces. Each variable should be set to the pieces that a Pawn may promote to. These variables are static for Chess but dynamic for Eurasian Chess. When it is empty, a Pawn may not move to the last rank. Here's what it looks like for Pre-Move 1 for White:

set wprom intersection keys capturedpieces array Q R B N C V;

castling: the K may move 2 OR 3 sq towards the R

I just added some subroutines to the fairychess include file for this. These are castle2, castlepos2, and stalemated2, which are substitutes for castle, castlepos, and stalemated. Unlike castle and castlepos, castle2 and castlepos2 take four arguments instead of two. The first two are the same as before, the from and to coordinates for the King. These should be followed by the from and to coordinates for the piece the King is castling with. Unlike castle, which will handle all possible castling moves in the direction of the King's move, castle2 specifies a specific castling move. The stalemated2 subroutine differs from stalemated by calling castlepos2 and by writing out legal castling moves as two-piece moves.

The code in the preset also has to be changed to accommodate this. This line should be added in the Pre-Game code:

allow moves 2

You will also have to set different values for bcastle and wcastle. Instead of giving them a list of all the spaces a King may castle to, each should be given a list of fully described castling moves. Each should appear as four coordinates in parentheses in the same order they are fed into castle2. For your game, you would want to include four sets of coordinates for each King, one for each specific castling move.

In the Post-Move sections, castling moves have to be handled separately from regular moves. This means that the King subroutine should be rewritten to not include castling. An example of what to do can be seen in the preset for Miller's Spherical Chess, which uses the versions of these subroutines from the logical include file. The relevant code looks like this for White:

if isupper alias $prevmoved:
  if == $prevmoved K and == $moved R:
    if == $origin a1:
      gosub castle2 e1 c1 a1 d1;
    elseif == $origin h1:
      gosub castle2 e1 g1 h1 f1;
    else:
      die $moves "is illegal. Go back and try again.";
    endif;
  elseif != $prevmoved P or != $moved P or != $prevdest $dest:
    die "Except for castling or pawn promotion, you may not move twice on the same turn.";
  endif;
elseif ...

This uses the variable $prevmoved for the previous value of $moved. Usually, $prevmoved will have the piece last moved by the opponent. This block of code will run if the piece in $prevmoved belongs to the player moving, which happens in a two-part move. In Chess, these would be castling or pawn promotion. In a castling move, $prevmoved will have the player's own King. Using this variable saved me from having to write code like I did for multi-move variants. If it's not a castling move, it returns an error unless it is a pawn promotion. This lets the code exclude other double moves. Note that this code would have to be tweaked for your game.

Finally, the Post-Game code should use stalemated2 instead of stalemated.

I don't know how I had found it worked. Today, it doesn't work

What doesn't work? The new URL for this page works, and the old URL goes to a 404 page with a link to the new URL, which is what it is supposed to do.

I'm asked the pwd for fairmirza.

What? I don't know what you're saying.

Using fairy-test rather than default, I am working on getting it to handle the scenario where all pieces except the King are held in hand. The board has only 36 spaces pieces can be held in hand on, but there are 38 that may be held in hand. For testing purposes, the following series of moves brings the board to a position in which 36 pieces have been captured, and the others may soon be captured:

1. p 7g-7f 
1... P 3c-3d 
2. b 8h-2b; +b-dest 
2... S 3a-2b 
3. b*2f 
3... B*8h 
4. b 2f-5c; +b-dest 
4... B 8h-9i; +B-dest 
5. +b 5c-6c 
5... +B 9i-8i 
6. +b 6c-7c // - Check! -
6... N 8a-7c 
7. p 7f-7e 
7... +B 8i-7i 
8. p 7e-7d 
8... +B 7i-6i // - Check! -
9. k 5i-6i 
9... R 8b-5b 
10. p 7d-7c; +p-dest 
10... R 5b-5g; +R-dest 
11. +p 7c-8c 
11... +R 5g-4g 
12. +p 8c-9c 
12... +R 4g-3g 
13. r 2h-7h 
13... +R 3g-2g 
14. r 7h-7a; +r-dest 
14... +R 2g-2i 
15. +r 7a-9a 
15... +R 2i-1i 
16. +r 9a-6a // - Check! -
16... K 5a-4b 
17. +r 6a-4a // - Check! -
17... K 4b-3c 
18. +r 4a-2a 
18... +R 1i-1g 
19. +r 2a-1a 
19... +R 1g-6g // - Check! -
20. k 6i-7i 
20... +R 6g-8g 
21. +r 1a-2b // - Check! -
21... K 3c-4d 
22. +r 2b-1c 
22... +R 8g-9g 
23. +r 1c-2c 
23... +R 9g-9c 
24. +r 2c-3d // - Check! -
24... K 4d-5e 
25. +r 3d-4c 
25... +R 9c-4c 
26. k 7i-6h 
26... +R 4c-4i 
27. s 3i-4h 
27... K 5e-5f 
28. s 4h-4g // - Check! -

Besides using the fairychess include file, the new Shogi preset uses its own fairyshogi include file. Here I'll go over some of the new features in this include file.

Besides using -Range functions to indicate the range of movement of a piece, this include file uses -Drop functions to indicate which spaces a piece may be legally dropped on. The stalemated function uses a foreach-next loop to go through all empty spaces on the board, and it tests each space with the Drop function for the piece to be dropped. The simplest Drop function looks like this:

def Unrestricted-Drops #0 or true;

This just returns true, and it gets copied to every piece that can be dropped to any empty space like so:

foreach notation array r R b B g G s S:
    set funcname join const #notation "-Drop";
    copyfn Unrestricted-Drops #funcname;
next;

Lances and Knights have slightly more complicated Drop functions:

def White_Lance-Drop onboard where #0 0 1;
def Black_Lance-Drop onboard where #0 0 -1;
def White_Shogi_Knight-Drop onboard where #0 0 2;
def Black_Shogi_Knight-Drop onboard where #0 0 -2;

Instead of testing for specific ranks, these use onboard and where to test whether there is a space on the board one or two spaces ahead of the location the piece might be dropped on. This works better with boards of different sizes than naming specific ranks would.

The Pawns have the most complicated Drop functions:

def White_Shogi_Pawn-Drop allfalse lambda (== const space #0 White_Shogi_Pawn) merge ray #0 0 1 ray #0 0 -1 and onboard where #0 0 1;
def Black_Shogi_Pawn-Drop allfalse lambda (== const space #0 Black_Shogi_Pawn) merge ray #0 0 1 ray #0 0 -1 and onboard where #0 0 -1;

Beginning at the end, these first make the same test as the Lance's Drop functions do. Next, they test whether there is another Pawn on the same file. This is done by passing allfalse a lambda function that takes as its input an array of all the spaces in the file except the one the Pawn may potentially drop to. Whether this is an actual or a potential move, this space does not need to be tested. For an actual move, the Pawn will already be there before the test is performed, and for a potential move, a drop there would not be considered unless this space were already empty. To test the other spaces, the code uses the codename for the type of Pawn being checked. This is to prevent the function from being dependent on specific notation for a piece.

This function does not test whether a Pawn drop will checkmate the King. This last test is done within the stalemated subroutine after temporarily dropping the Pawn.

Because not all piece labels are entirely alphabetic, it now uses haslower and hasupper instead of islower and isupper to identify which side pieces are on.

Because functions are normally global, the stalemated and matedbypawn subroutines do not define functions within themselves. Instead of defining the friend function, they set the variable friend to a lambda function that gets called by fn #friend. Instead of defining the friends function, they set the friends variable to an array of all pieces on the same side. Unlike functions, these are kept local to the subroutine they were created in, allowing matedbypawn to use some of the same variable names as stalemated without messing up the assignments stalemated has made to variables with the same name.

Since the new preset appears to be more bug-free, I copied the default settings file to default-backup, and I copied the one I was working on to default. So, past, current and new Shogi games will all use the new Shogi preset that uses the fairychess include file. Details are on the page.

I'm working on a new Shogi preset that will use the fairychess file. I created new built-in functions for it I'll describe tomorrow. Here is a sequence of moves I am using for testing. The current position is one where a Pawn drop would cause checkmate if it were allowed. It currently stops the actual move, but it still displays the Pawn drop as a legal move. Since I am having trouble posting the form, here is the list of moves:

1. p 5g-5f 
1... P 3c-3d 
2. p 7g-7f 
2... B 2b-8h; +B-dest 
3. s 7i-8h 
3... B*5g 
4. g 6i-6h 
4... B 5g-2d; +B-dest 
5. p 2g-2f 
5... P 5c-5d 
6. p 5f-5e 
6... P 5d-5e 
7. g 6h-5g 
7... +B 2d-5g 
8. g 4i-5h 
8... +B 5g-3i 
9. b*5g 
9... +B 3i-2h 
10. n 8i-7g 
10... S*7h 
11. k 5i-6h 
11... S 7h-8i; +S-dest 
12. p 2f-2e 
12... P 2c-2d 
13. p 2e-2d 
13... P 6c-6d 
14. p 2d-2c; +p-dest 
14... P*2b 
15. +p 2c-2b 
15... R 8b-2b 
16. p 6g-6f 
16... +S 8i-8h 
17. p*5b // - Check! -
17... G 4a-5b 
18. n 7g-6e 
18... P 6d-6e 
19. p 6f-6e 
19... +S 8h-9i 
20. p*5f 
20... N*7e 
21. p 8g-8f 
21... R*8g 
22. p 5f-5e 
22... L*7g 
23. p 6e-6d 
23... +S 9i-8i 
24. p 5e-5d 
24... +S 8i-7i 
25. p 5d-5c; +p-dest 
25... G 5b-5c 
26. p 6d-6c; +p-dest 
26... G 5c-6c 
27. p*5i 
27... P*6g // - Check! -
28. g 5h-6g 
28... N 7e-6g; +N-dest // - Check! -
29. k 6h-6g 
29... R 8g-8h; +R-dest 
30. b 5g-4f 
30... R 2b-5b 
31. n*2c 
31... S*6e 
32. n 2c-1a; +n-dest

Since the previous preset for Eurasian Chess was ancient and lacking in some modern features, I wrote a new one using the fairychess include file. It's not official yet, but I'm providing the link for beta testing:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Eurasian+Chess&settings=fairychess

Have you tried entering the promotion manually? Game Courier's features were added in stages, and older presets need to be rewritten to benefit from newer features. Promotion is not mandatory until the last rank, and the ability to prompt you about available promotion options is a newer feature. The code for Eurasian Chess is so old, it was ending every line with a semicolon instead of using a colon after lines that introduce blocks of code.

I speak of the link with the name of the game which is written just below the diagram in the GC page.

Okay, I changed that to use the $rulesurl variable calculated in the header, which can be different than the value stored in $rules. So, it should work now.

It seems like the Rules URL is broken for every game.

I tried multiple presets, including Shako and Expanded Chess, and the Rules URL worked fine every time. Instead of saying every game, which obviously you can't confirm without exhaustive work, tell me which particular presets you are seeing this problem in.

The problem appears to be that you are not updating the value of k or K when the King moves. This gives inaccurate data to both the checked and stalemated subroutines, which results in inaccurate return values. So, it is an instance of garbage in, garbage out.

In my tests of how intersection works, it will return an associative array when the first array is associative and the second is sequential. It will also treat a variable name as a constant name if there is no variable by that name and there is a constant by that name. So, what I thought were problems with the code might not be.

If the purpose of these intersections is to weed out empty spaces, the same thing can be accomplished more easily with diff noupper @ or diff nolower @.

I notice that your calls to stalemated include two arguments, but only one parameter is defined for the subroutine.

Also, Daniel Zacharias found that if you enter King moves manually, it works fine.

The King's legal moves were highlighted for the first player, but they were not for the second player. After I moved the King manually, it declared check. Considering how your pieces move, this seems inaccurate. All I did was move each King forward to file 6.

He thinks the problem may be in the stalemated subroutine. When I coded this preset, I removed the checkmated subroutine used in my other presets to simplify the code a bit. so that would make sense.

After the two King moves I mentioned, the only highlighted legal moves are to 5j, the space vacated by the King. After each one of these moves, it declared "Checkmate! Black has won!" When I tried other moves I expected to be legal, I could make them, but then it would declare Checkmate again.

Looking at your Post-Game code, I see lines for enforcing the rule against checkmating with a Pawn drop. Code for this should be handled by the stalemated subroutine, because it has to apply to potential moves, not just to actual moves. However, I don't think that code is responsible for the inaccurate estimates of check and stalemate.

Since it declares checkmate only when checked and stalemated both return true, there may be bugs in both, or there may be a bug in a function called by both, such as the definition of a piece move, or there may be a bug in checked, which is also called by stalemated.

Since the checked subroutine shows problems by itself, and it is also called by the stalemated subroutine, it could well be the problem. It works differently than the checked subroutine I have in the fairychess include file. It sets enemies to an intersection between noupper and #bpieces or nolower and #wpieces. However, there are no variables called bpieces or wpieces. There are only constants by these names, and these two constants are sequential arrays. However, noupper and nolower return associative arrays. So, an intersection would not give you the desired result.

I see the same error in your stalemated subroutine. You are trying to find an intersection between an associative array and a variable that does not exist, and the constant with its name is a sequential array anyway.

Posting a link would help.

What might a concrete advantage of every piece (except Vaos) being able to move behind the pawn line in the setup be? [edit: closest thing to that I can think of, so far, is that a player sometimes just might be able to evade an attack/skewer by an enemy Vao or Cannon, in a way he couldn't otherwise]

Along the lines you imagined, it makes valuable pieces less prone to capture by pieces that can hop or leap over the Pawn lines. Since the Vao is the least valuable piece, it is the piece least in need of having an escape route. Notably, Chinese Chess, which introduced the Cannon, leaves more space around the pieces than Chess does.

I have noticed that several games of Gross Chess end up with some Marshalls and/or Archbishops unmoved. Maybe the presence of two Marshalls and two Archbishops is somewhat excessive.

Even if a piece doesn't move, it influences the moves of other pieces by protecting or threatening other spaces on the board. So, not moving these pieces isn't evidence that they are playing no role in the game. This may rather be a sign that because of differences in playing ability, one player is having an easy time defeating another player. In the endgames I can recall from Gross Chess, both players got down to very little material and had to employ whatever pieces they had left.

I wonder if a variant with a single Marshall on g1 and Archbishop on f1 with empty a1, b1, k1, l1 would be worth to be investigated.

One problem with this is that it destroys the symmetry of the setup. Another problem is that it leaves the King, Queen, Bishops and Cannons without any empty spaces to move to behind the Pawn line, and a game with this setup may as well be played on a 10x10 board, since it doesn't make effective use of the greater space provided on a 12x12 board.

An experiment might be to switch all the Kts with the Champions AND switch all the Wizards with the Archbishops, in the setup - play testing could proceed from there, if anyone thinks this may be a good idea to try.

One of the deliberate features of the setup is that every piece except the Vaos has an empty space it can move to behind the Pawn line. If you made these changes to the setup, the Knights, Champions, and Archbishops would no longer have any empty spaces they could move to behind the Pawn line.

Can you give me a link or a series of moves in which this error comes up?

Since my conversion to Unicode didn't match the previous version at all, I restored the original version from a copy on archive.org. While I don't know much Chinese, I do now recognize some characters in appropriate places. However, since this translation was done by Babelfish in 1996, it may not be such a good translation.

I then converted the introduction from every encoding to Windows-1252, and I got this as a conversion from UTF-8:

Bobby Fischer，前世界國際象棋冠軍，提出一種國際象棋 的變體，其中棋子的初始配置是隨機選擇的。Fischer從而加入了如Capablanca等，提出國際象棋變體的前世界冠軍之列，然而其他的變體都沒有被成功推行過。 菲舍爾任意制象棋與更古老的Shuffle Chess、Prechess(或其他有關的變體)有些類似，但是有自己獨特的風格。這個遊戲廣泛的介紹和歷史 由Eric van Reem所寫。

This looks like a clean conversion to Chinese, and I even see 象棋 repeated a few times. Does this look accurate to you, Bn?

I converted the introduction from every encoding available for mb_convert_encoding() to UTF-8. Some included Chinese characters, but many of these mixed in Korean or Japanese characters. The conversion most densely packed with Chinese characters was BIG-5, which I know is a Chinese encoding. But I can't tell if it says anything intelligible. Here is what I got:

Bobby Fischer簿翹?疇?兜?瓣繡??癟?〣?疇??嘔怵﹦€疑阬授￣汕?€嘔乒€??癡罈?簿翹?疆??疇?¯疑刈詹?珍岑阬員a href="http://www.chessvariants.org/d.chess/chess.html">疇??嘔怵﹦€疑阬授￣汕?€較/a> 癟禳??癡簧?矇竄??簿翹?疇?汕亂刈蜃倥汕?€嘔氐倦?癟禳??疇??疇禮?嘔抽€汕?癟翻簧疆?簪矇禳穡疆穢顫矇?繡疆???￣巫﹦€?瓊?砂€?Fischer疇職鱉癡?玳?疇??疇?汕永刈算€?疇礎??Capablanca癟簫?冕純敷?疆??疇?¯疑汀??嘔怵﹦€疑阬授￣汕?€嘔阬敉?矇竄??癟禳??疇?兜?瓣繡??癟?〣?疇???癡罈?瓣繒?嘔瓦???簿翹?癟??繞癡?玳?疇?汕亂刈領€?癟禳??癡簧?矇竄??矇?翻疆簡??疆??冕阬Ⅹ姻竹??疇?顫疆鬚穡癡癒?矇?鬚瓊?砂€? 癡?簡癡??癟?職瓣罈罈疆???疇?繞癡簣癒疆瞿?嘔佯??￣色€甄棺氐?瞻癡?玲?癟禳??Shuffle Chess瓊?玲?Prechess(疆???疇?汕亂刈領€?疆??冕抽€??癟禳??癡簧?矇竄??)疆??冕刈算€疑怏ˍ壅刈撢撳純敷?瓣翻??疆?簪疆??冕兩€¯秉氐溘掙岑?穡癟?兜嘔巫﹦€?矇瞽穡疆?翹瓊?砂€?矇?砂?〡乒?砂€嘔怏??疆?簡疇罈瞿疆糧?疑巫﹦€?瓣罈?嘔岑朝嘔乒€??疆簫繚疇?簡 癟??簣Eric van Reem疆?售?珍氐純姻??砂€?

I made the script to display from a backup database, but it didn't help. To prevent it from trying to use UTF-8, I even ran it on a different domain to avoid the .htaccess file on this site. But that didn't help. It appears that the corruption is in the earliest backup of the database, which is from 2017.

Older pages were generally written in Latin-1, and when I tried to enforce a site-wide use of UTF-8, some things didn't convert correctly. I have some backups of the database from when the columns in MemberSubmissions were still using the latin1_swedish_ci collation instead of the utf8_general_ci collation. I'll try to put together a script that will read from a backup database and not enforce UTF-8 to see if it will display properly. But that's for tomorrow, as it is time to shut down my computer for the night.

This page was displaying as gobbledegook, because it was not written in UTF-8. Using Notepad++, I converted it into Chinese characters. Since I cannot read Chinese, though, I cannot tell if I fixed anything. Although many characters are now Chinese, there are some suspicious characters, such as one that looks like a gamepad, the Japanese letter Ru, and the female/Venus symbol. So, I think I'll try a different approach on the backup site.

Put the name of the settings file you want to use in the Redirect field for the deprecated preset. Then, when someone tries to invite someone to play with the deprecated preset, the new one will be used instead.

I don't use a Mac, though I don't think the computer one is using would make a difference. The preset for this page is

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Apothecary+Chess-Modern&settings=ApothecaryChess-Modern

The preset for the open invitation Richard Milner made and the games he is playing is this:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Apothecary+Chess-Modern&settings=ApothecaryChess-Modern

These are the same. So, I don't know what the problem is.

Since the Chess Variant Pages was founded in 1997, 2022 marks the Silver Anniversary of the site. Any thoughts on what we should do to mark this occasion?

For a while, I thought Primary Links were the same thing as Items marked IsPrimary, and changes I made to queryinc.php reflected this. I now realize that they are completely different things with similar names. A primary link is the index entry that should be used for an Item when primarylinksonly is selected. I have now modified queryinc.php to work this way.

Since the IndexEntry table has multiple rows with the same ItemID having PrimaryLink set to 1, I have begun to work on selecting a single Primary Link for each Item. To help with that, I am using this script, which lists all primary links for items with multiple primary links.

https://www.chessvariants.com/index/finddupprime.php

If you're an editor, and you have some time to help, you can go to a page on this list, then go to its Links link at the bottom and choose which link should be primary.

To avoid having multiple primary links to the same Item in the future, I have modified modifylink.php to enforce some rules. These are that there must be one primary link, and there may not be more than one primary link. So, if you select one link to be primary, all other links to the same item will be made non-primary. If you select a link to be non-primary, but there is no other primary link to the same item, it will be made primary.

I updated the grammar and some spelling on most of the page, rewording some things to make them clearer.

Since I don't understand the 64+16 rule, I left the text for it alone.

It looks like you're trying to describe moves using conventions from Chinese Chess. The moves would be more clearly described to a western audience if you used algebraic notation.

If you mean for Guard Soldiers to look different than Soldiers, I would recommend using a different piece set for your piece images. The one you're using has only Chinese Chess pieces in it.

In a short game in which I was moving Pawns out of the way to move the E piece, I tried each E piece, and it gave the error "g4 is empty" each time. Since g4 was in fact empty, I did a quicker game in which I just moved Pawns near the E and e piece before moving the E piece. This gave the error:

ILLEGAL: P i4-i5 on turn 1:

There was no P on i4. The piece on i4 is a E.

Go back with your browser's BACK button, reload the page, and try again.

For diagnostic purposes, here is the full movelist:

1. P i4-i5 
1... p i9-i8 
2. E j3-i4

I then took back the last move, cleared a space for the other E piece to move, moved an e piece, then moved the other E piece. This time, I got the error "i4 is empty".

So, it's looking like there is something wrong with the E piece.

When I entered that sequence of moves all at once, I got the same error. Then I entered each move separately and still got the same error. So, I took back the last move and found another legal move, which worked out. A little later, I tested other moves by the E and e pieces, and when I moved the other E piece, though not an e piece, I got the same error. Taking back that move and trying E again later, I got the error "g4 is empty". There seems to be something wrong with the E piece, but I am too unfamiliar with the workings of this generated code to debug it.

What was that problem, specifically? What doesn't work?

@Fergus: please also have a look at the problem reported here.

Do you mean the problem reported by Daniel Zacharias, which I just gave the solution to? Or were you describing an independent problem? If so, I would need a link.

It will be easier to look into this if you first fix the display of pieces on Black's turn. You need to set $flipped to the same value as $pieces, because Alfaerie:Many includes some flipped pieces, but your game does not.

I introduced a general problem last night regarding the parsing of $_POST values, and I have now fixed it.

When I tested the value of $pieces at the very end of the code, it matched the value for #mypieces on Black's turn. So, the problem might not be in the GAME Code but in the PHP that operates after the GAME Code is run.

In the following preset:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Grand+Apothecary+Chess+1&settings=Applet

the pictures are not shown properly.when playing in online mode. In the local play mode things are fine.

In my testing, images show up fine on White's turn but not on Black's. On Black's turn, the pieces for I, U, and Y do not show up. In the HTML, no piece file is provided for these pieces. It also gets some pieces wrong. It shows a Zebra for the Cannon, a Camel for the Jester, a Gold General for the Kangaroo, an Amazon for the Bird, and a Marshall for the Tank. Another thing happening on Black's turn is that it displays the entire Alfaerie:Many piece set at the bottom of the page. But when it is White's turn, it does not. So, I'm thinking that $pieces is being set to #mypieces only on White's turn and not on Black's.