Comments by FergusDuniho

Alpha is the font that Alfaerie is based on, but Alfaerie got its start here and has almost as much history here as Utrecht does. Before Alfaerie came along, Utrecht provided more images of different Chess variant pieces than other sets did, which was important for representing many Chess variants. But Alfaerie does what Utrecht did, and it does it better.

The file is at

/home/chessvariants/public_html/play/jocly/dist/browser/games/chessbase/team-mate-rules.html

Whether capturable or mobile, obstacles should be thought of as neutral pieces that do not capture. If they are neither capturable nor mobile, then they are just features of the terrain like holes in the board and shouldn't properly be thought of as obstacles. If they can be moved by only one player and not the other, they would count as part of that player's forces rather than as obstacles. Likewise, if they could be captured by only one player, they could be considered part of the other player's forces in some sense. If they could capture other pieces, they would be equal-opportunity weapons rather than mere obstacles. So, to count as obstacles, they would have to be neutral non-capturing pieces that are either capturable by either player or movable by either player.

I now have it working correctly. In the assignment of default values, I had to change 0 to false for each of the categories, because there is code further on that will convert a value to a numeric value if the default is numeric, and it ends up converting strings to 0. But the categories should be Booleans, not numbers, and string values for them should be treated as true, not as false.

The section of Pritchard's Classified Encyclopedia of Chess Variants for Boards based on hexagons mentions that the 9-rank board with Pawns on the 3rd and 7th ranks is a revision of the original variant. So, this should probably be called De Vasa's Hexagonal Chess II.

I suppose it should depend on how many you want to add. A few illustrative puzzles would be appropriate here, but if you want to provide a large collection, it may be appropriate to put them on their own page.

Ludii identifies a different game by the name Breakthrough Chess.

Ludii calls this game Banqi, and it gives Half Chess, Dark Chess, and Blind Chess as alternate names.

OK, done!

Although it looks like you have updated the SVG images, you have not updated the PNG images this diagram is actually using. They are still colored #909090, and their timestamps are from before I got up this morning.

I have several of my games on Jocly, no 0! Shako, Wild Tamerlane, Metamachy, Gigachess, Terachess, Rollerball.

It now says you have six games on Jocly, and they're the six you listed.

Since the year of creation wasn't set for this game, I set it to 2020, the year this page was created. If it was created earlier, please let me know. I also changed the Jocly link for the first version to point to our site, and I edited some file names in Jocly to make sure the rules show up.

Although this article says that Ultima was played by NOST, it does not mention any issues of NOSTalgia describing the game. The oldest issue of NOSTalgia that I could find material from through the Wayback Machine is #367, and none of the available articles mentioned Ultima in the title.

This page is missing some graphics in the description of the rules.

I changed the name of pgnu.png to bgnu.png, since it seems to have been a typo, and /home/chessvariants/public_html/play/pbm/sets/auto-xboard.php was expecting bgnu.png, which was missing.

From the starting position it is not possible to make two moves with pawns from columns b and g. For example, p b11-b10 and p b12-b11 for black.

I successfully made those two moves on Black's first turn. I also did the same with Pawns in the g file. So, I didn't find this to be true.

Since the first move is not displayed on the board, on the square where the piece that made the first move stood, you cannot place another piece on your second move.

This isn't true. Maybe you tried to enter both moves at once in an incorrect format. Moves on the same turn should be separated by semicolons, and if you enter just one move at a time, it will update the board and prompt you for the second move.

This is now fixed. There was a remaining conditional that broke out of a loop when the King was in check, and White's first move left a King in check. With that conditional removed, it completed White's second move and correctly evaluated that both Black Kings were captured and that White had won.

I programmed this game by modifying the code for Balanced Marseillais Chess. But I have not yet tested it to make sure everything works correctly.

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/doublemovedoublechess

Okay, that is fixed.

It's not a duty, though. It's a supererogatory public service, and I have more important things to do than review submissions whose graphics do not meet my standards.

I refreshed the page and saw the kanji pieces, which do look a lot better than the old ones. However, I do not see any buttons for switching the piece set, and kanji pieces on a checkered board looks incongruous.

The counting now appears to be working correctly. It counts both the stones belonging to a player and the empty spaces surrounded only by that player's stones and not by any of the other player's stones.

It doesn't need a subject thread, because it already has a page, and you can post comments to the page.

I see I still haven't written the subroutine for adding up scores. Here is a sample game I did for testing purposes:

1. s*d5 
1... S*e5 
2. s*e6 
2... S*e4 
3. s*f5 
3... S*e3 
4. s*f4 
4... S*h7 
5. s*d4 
5... S*b7 
6. s*f3 
6... S*e7 
7. s*d3 
7... S*h2 
8. s*d2 
8... S*e2 
9. s*e1 
9... S*f2 
10. s*g2 
10... S*f1 
11. s*g1 
11... S*f6 
12. s*e4 
12... S*h5 
13. pass 
13... pass // - White has won #scorew to #scoreb -

The result is wrong, because it has not actually calculated the scores, and it is just favoring the variable name that comes later alphabetically.

Firstly, I am not a programmer, so I just don’t know HOW this is done,

There is a Developer's Guide and several tutorials for programming a game for Game Courier. For this particular game, you could probably start with the code for Extra Move Chess or Balanced Marseillais Chess and make some modifications for your game. I think the latter may be more similar to your game. However, if you have no experience programming, it could be tricky to do it just right. Barring that, it's also possible to create an unprogrammed version of your game. This will not enforce rules or display legal moves, but it will let people play in an over-the-board kind of way, as you would with a physical set.

and secondly, even if I were one, I would consider such actions simply not correct on my part.

Over a thousand games are available for Game Courier, and I certainly did not program or personally approve of all of them. People are using Game Courier to play games I've never heard of and do not know how to play. One thing that increases the status of a game here is if someone programs it for Game Courier and people start playing it here, and inventors are free to program their own games if they are able to.

Since editors use some scripts that other members do not, this might be a script I do not use frequently. What is the URL of the script that is not working right for you?

What effect does promoting a Pawn to a Knight have on the object of the game? There are two options:

1. It mainly increases the vulnerability of the player who promotes a Pawn to a Knight, because it gives the opponent one more target.
2. The opponent now has to capture one more Knight to win, which is an advantage for the player promoting a Pawn to a Knight.

I still don't think this counts as a Chess variant. It is a procedure for selecting a Chess variant to play from a very limited set of variants. But people who want to play a Chess variant together can already choose from a vast selection of them, and there is no need to use a procedure like the one described here to decide what to play.

I did some more digging into games like this, and I found Baseline chess with Fischer rules. So, this is not a new idea.

I have now redesigned the layout with flexbox.

I moved three comments that were mainly on Shafran's Hexagonal Chess, and I provided some context in an Editor's Note. I'll now go ahead and delete this submission.

I don't think this counts as a Chess variant. It is a plan for playing multiple games that include Chess and some modest Chess variants.

Chess960 is not so old that it is appropriate to call another game Modern Chess960. Try to find a more fitting name that actually captures the difference between your game and Bobby Fischer's.

This page can be removed.

Before I do that, I might want to move some of your discussion about Shafran's Hexagonal Chess to the new page I have made about it.

yet surprisingly there is no cv.com page for it other than this one.

There is now, 19 years later. See Shafran's Hexagonal Chess.

This is nearing completion. One complication is that this game has descending ranks, while Game Courier and the Diagram Designer have been using ascending ranks. Both methods are perfectly logical ways of handling ranks for hexagonal variants, and the choice between them is arbitrary. So, I want to add support for using descending ranks to represent hexagonal boards.

I got Shako working by redirecting it to the originalShako directory. I'm currently having trouble getting Rollerball Chess to work. The link is

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/jocly/rollerball-chess

Okay, we'll feature Shako in April. It has been programmed for Jocly, Game Courier, ChessV, Zillions-of-Games, PyChess, and Ai Ai, and it even has an Interactive Diagram on the page. Its games on Game Courier go back to 2006, and it has been played every year on Game Courier since 2015. On a personal note, it is one of the first Chess variants I learned about after getting involved with this site, as it was in the Large Variant contest of 1999, and David and I were trying out variants in that contest together.

The whole site should now appear at a more normal size in the Kindle browser, because I used the @media query described earlier to zoom the contents by a factor of 2 in Kindles.

I have found a simple way to increase the size of everything on the Kindle. It looks like this:

@media (min-width: 1060px) and (max-width: 7in) {
    HTML {zoom: 2;}
}

While zoom is not official CSS, the Kindle browser accepts it, and that is all that really matters here. But for it to work properly, I have to roll back everything else I did to increase the size of things on the Kindle. Otherwise, this makes some things too large.

However, this fixes most things without quite doing that:

@media (min-width: 1060px) and (max-width: 7in) {
    HTML {font-size: 6pt;}
    MAIN {zoom: 2;}
}

I added a special media query to this page to recognize the browser available on the Kindle. Recent Kindles have a 300ppi screen, which results in displaying 300 pixels as an inch. Since most screens would display 300 pixels in a larger physical size, this can lead to images and text being too small in the Kindle browser. While it's Article mode can make a page more readable, it's best to not make readers need to rely on it. The query checks whether there are lots of pixels on a small screen. The idea is to check that the width is at least the width in pixels of the 6 inch Paperwhite and no more than the width of the 10.2 inch Scribe in inches. With some margin for error, the query looks like this:

@media (min-width: 1060px) and (max-width: 7in) {
}

Besides the size issue, the Kindle browser has hardly been updated in years, and it does not support many features that have become commonly supported in other browsers. For example, this page uses a flex display, but since the Kindle browers do not support this, I have provided some fallback CSS for putting some sections in columns.

So far, I have not been able to get Shako to work on Jocly. Here's the URL:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/jocly/shako

In control.php, I have the string shako replaced by shako-chess, which the files for running it use. Also, https://www.chessvariants.com/play/jocly/shako-chess is not working any better.

I've noticed some different things about Shako. First, there is a folder called originalShako, and Shako is the only game with such a folder. Second, there is a Shako file called shako-chess-mxdel.js, and it is the only file matching the *mxdel* wildcard.

This is not a general problem with Jocly. Other games are working. I have tried multiple browsers, these being Firefox, Edge, and Waterfox.

H.G., would you know what's going on and how to fix this?

April is almost upon us. Does anyone have a nomination for a game to feature in April?

I got a Kindle Scribe yesterday, and I've been looking at this site in its web browser. Because it's a 300 PPI e-ink device with a large screen, it fits a lot of pixels on its screen, and various elements whose size has been defined in pixels appear small. Based on its 1860 screen width and 2480 screen height, I calculate that it is just about 6.2 inches wide and about 8.26 inches tall, and those values are very close to the less precise measurements I took with a ruler.

One step I've taken is to give HTML a font-size of 12pt in the CSS files. This doesn't change the appearance on my desktop, but it makes text a more comfortable size for reading in the Scribe's browser. One thing that's much smaller on the Scribe's screen is the Interactive Diagram. Since the screen has 300 pixels per inch, an 8x8 board with 50 pixel squares should be less than 1.5 inches wide, and that is in fact what I'm measuring. As long as the pieces are going to stretch to fit the size of the space, maybe you could make an Interactive Diagram increase in size on a large (in terms of pixels) mobile screen.

Should I presume that in variant 1, a King may move to or stay on an attacked space, and in variant 2, a King may not move into or remain in check?

It has occurred to me that there is a use for stretching normal sized GIFs and PNGs. One of the issues the Interactive Diagrams have had on my phone is that as the spaces get smaller than the pieces, the pieces get cropped, which looks really bad. For example, the one I made for Chess has this problem. But the one for Ultima does not have this problem, because the pieces are shrinking to fit the smaller space. This greatly improves the appearance of Interactive Diagrams on phones, and it removes one nagging issue I had with using Interactive Diagrams in place of static images. (The one remaining issue is that the spaces become rectangular on my phone. It would help to include some CSS for preserving the aspect ratio of spaces as they shrink to fit a small space.)

With this in mind, I had XnView do some mass file conversions on the Abstract and Motif pieces, and I uploaded these to new directories to test them out. I updated the Interactive Diagram to use them, and the extra space added to each image appears to be transparent. All I did, though, was set it to #00FF00, the same color used for the transparent color, and hoped that was good enough. So, I'll do some more testing later.

Which cache did you clear? Your browser's, or CloudFlare?

CloudFlare's. I just loaded it in Vivaldi, which is not the browser I was using before, and it used the correct spelling. So, it is working correctly now, and it was still showing the wrong spelling due to using the browser cache.

H. G.,

I've started working on a new version of your Interactive Diagram for Ultima that includes multiple piece sets, but I am having some issues with it. The first is that no pieces show up when the page loads. I have it set up to use the Motif set, which does show up when I hit the Motif button, but not when the page loads. The second issue is that the Abstract, Motif, and Ultima-Alt sets are being stretched to the borders of each space. My Interactive Diagram for Chess, which also uses Abstract and Motif, is not stretching the images, and I don't know why they're behaving differently. While the Alfaerie pieces are all the same dimensions, my Abstract and Motif pieces are not, because they don't include any extra surrounding space around the images. This is probably one of the factors involved, but the Interactive Diagram for Chess isn't having a problem with them.

I added a call to CreateBoard(0, 1) just before Display(), and it does resize the board, but now none of the pieces show up. So, I'm going to revert it back for the time being.

The problem with the image is that it is small and low-resolution. Zooming it to a larger size helps a bit, but its low resolution limits how effective that is. Ideally, the graphics need to be redone.

That has worked, though it is still calling the game Malett Chess when it loads. I tried to fix this by changing the name in mallett-chess-config.js, but the misspelling remained even after I purged this file from the cache.

Since the source was broken up into paragraphs, I resaved it as Markdown after adding in ### before some lines for H3 tags.

Your setup description is vague. Make it specific and detailed and include a diagram.

In an experiment I ran, I changed King to king in the 4th field. I had expected the King to show up for Alfaerie but not for the other sets. Instead, it did not show up for any set. Looking at the code, I saw I would also need to change the value of blackPrefix and whitePrefix. So, I got this far in finding a solution:

<input type="button" value="Abstract" onclick="graphDir='/graphics.dir/abstract/';whitePrefix='W';blackPrefix='B';Display();">
<input type="button" value="Alfaerie" onclick="graphDir='/graphics.dir/alfaerie/';whitePrefix='w';blackPrefix='b';Display();">
<input type="button" value="Magnetic" onclick="graphDir='/graphics.dir/magnetic/';whitePrefix='W';blackPrefix='B';Display();">
<input type="button" value="Motif" onclick="graphDir='/graphics.dir/motif/';whitePrefix='W';blackPrefix='B';Display();">

With this much, I tried the same experiment again, and the Kings showed up for Alfaerie but not for the other sets. If I knew what variables were used for the pieces names, I could change those too, and this solution should work.

I changed some text that still used the old name to use the new name, and I published this. I didn't change the ItemID, which affects the URL, because that takes more work, and you might prefer some vestige of the old name. If not, I can change that too.

I added some external links to the bottom of the page and published this.

I set up the Interactive Diagram to use different piece sets, and it works for three of them, but the other one uses different file names for the pieces. How can I make it know which file names to use for this set?

Okay, that's fixed.

I sent an email to Nick Wolff, and we'll see if he responds.

They were inspired by a 3D set within a computer program for playing Chess I had for my Amiga, and that set may have been inspired by the Bauhaus and Man Ray sets, but I was unaware of them at the time.

I renamed the malett-chess* files to mallett-chess*, including in the control.php script, but I think it's still expecting the old name, because /play/jocly/mallett-chess does not load the game. Is there anything else I can change to get this to work?

They capture by dissecting — going through all the opponent's pieces to the free square behind them.

Dissect does not mean what you think it does. The capturing ability you describe sounds similar to the Long Leaper from Ultima, though without the same restrictions. Some examples of what you're describing could help. Are multiple captures possible on one turn? If so, how exactly does it work?

It's best to leave comments like this on the page for your game. That way, the page in question is just a click away when we see this.

The program is dead again.

By which you mean that the link is not working. If the creator of this program would like to provide us with a copy we can host here, that would be best. That way, it will remain available for the life of this website.

H. G., the description for this game was about Shako. So, I deleted its contents. In the rules section, you have links to two images that are missing. If you have them, could you upload them to the correct location?