Comments by FergusDuniho

I meant a blue piece on a black background.

Happy Birthday.

This is for the Darker color scheme, which has a black background. Blue will be fine, since it shows up well against black, and it contrasts with another piece being white. The tallest piece in the Dark scheme's logo is 427, and the height of the logo is 432. Without the pieces, the text part of the logo has a height of 415. If I do like I did with the Light logo, a piece height of 285 would work.

Since the fairychess include file uses a shortcode to display pieces, I changed how the shortcode works instead of any code in the fairychess include file. I modified it to include WIDTH and HEIGHT values in the IMG tag when the image is an SVG image. These will be equal to $width and $height when these variables have values, as they usually do in Game Courier, and they will be 50 otherwise.

I have now updated Mobile Detect to 4.8.06. Since it works differently than the old version, mobile detection was a bit wonky until I got it working correctly.

The inside part should be colored #f9f9f9. Using the background color for inside the piece makes it transparent and impossible to recolor properly.

I modified the Dark color scheme to use a darker color for the text that works well with the chocolate background color. This is to make reading more comfortable on brightly lit screens. However, it was too low contrast on my Likebook Mars.

So I have added a new high contrast color scheme called Darker, represented by the New Moon emoji in the color scheme selection form. This is intended mainly for eink devices for which the Dark color scheme may be too low contrast, though you may still use it on other devices if you prefer it. In general, its background colors are darker, and its text colors are lighter. For the main background and text, it uses black and white. Unlike the Light and Dark color schemes, this one is not available through your browser settings. It is available only by selecting it on the website, and you may have to refresh your cache before it starts working.

I am not sure where these set files are stored,

They are stored in

/home/chessvariants/public_html/play/pbm/sets/

nor am I sure how to upload the new versions to the site.

Do you know how to use SCP or SFTP? Do you still have the passwords I sent you by email?

My iPad has iOS 17.4.1, but I do have access to an old iPhone with iOS 15.8.2. The dark scheme partially works on it, but I see that the logo is not changing. It shows the elephant and unicorn logos instead of the dragon horse and (fairy) princess logos even when it is in dark mode. By substituting an older CSS file in index.html, I could tell that color-mix was not working, and blue but especially indigo did not contrast well with the dark background. I found this iPhone had the same problems in both Firefox and Chrome. At least using custom properties instead of color-mix has fixed the problem with the link text color.

To get the logo to change, I tried using the <picture> tag. As I feared, it would not work unless dark mode was selected at the browser level. This is why I normally use CSS to switch the logo. Chrome and Safari did not provide me any means to select dark mode at the browser level, though Firefox did. But when I selected dark mode in Firefox at the browser level, it wasn't working. Using test pages, I got it to work for browser selected dark mode by removing a test using :not. But doing this disabled the ability to select the light scheme from the menu when the browser's dark mode is turned on. I tried to fix this, and while my fix works on my desktop, it does not work in the Firefox app on this iPhone. So, I have no solution for getting the right logo to show up on this older iPhone that would work equally well with both methods of selecting the color scheme.

I still don't get why the previous way wasn't working since I wasn't changing the pawn subroutine which seems to modify promotion options before the last rank.

The Pawn subroutines are only for actual moves, but nothing was being done to handle variable values of wprom or bprom for potential moves. The stalemated subroutine was supposed to provide a list of all legal moves, but it was omitting moves where someone declines promoting a Pawn. By having functions that dynamically calculate what a piece may promote to, it is now able to provide an accurate list of legal moves for games with variable promotion rules, such as Gross Chess has.

Anyway, this reveals another, but more minor, problem, which is that when a pawn gets to the promotion zone the text in the option selection box is large enough that the lines overlap slightly.

I increased the line-height and made some changes to the borders.

To get access to the CVP pages I logged in with an account of a friend.

You didn't have to do that. You can post comments without signing in.

I have not been able to access the CVP pages for a few days now. ... Something seems to have gone wrong with my password.

I have sent you a new password by email.

In looking into this, I tested Gross Chess to see if it had the same problem, but before I could tell, I encountered another problem with it. I realized that for a game like Gross Chess it wouldn't do to use bprom and wprom as though they had static values. So I rewrote the fairychess include file and the Gross Chess code to support dynamic values for what a piece is allowed to promote to on a given space.

This makes use of some new functions that end with "-Promote". Here are the default functions for the Pawns:

def White_Pawn-Promote var wprom;
def Black_Pawn-Promote var bprom;

For backwards compatibility with the original way of handling promotions, these just return the value of wprom or bprom. And for additional backwards compatibility, the stalemated subroutine will use these functions only if the piece is not in the promotable array. So, to enable the use of these functions for providing dynamic values for what a piece can promote to, you should unset promotable or set it to an empty array. I added this line to Gross Chess after including the fairychess include file.

unset promotable;

Since the default functions return static values, they need to be rewritten for the particular game they are for. Here are the functions I wrote for Gross Chess:

def White_Pawn-Promote merge intersection var cap elem - rank #0 9 ((B N V W) (B N V W C R S) (B N V W C R S A M Q)) elem - rank #0 9 ((P) (P));
def Black_Pawn-Promote merge intersection var cap elem rank #0 ((b n v w c r s a m q) (b n v w c r s) (b n v w)) elem rank #0 (() (p) (p));

Since what a Pawn may promote to in Gross Chess depends upon the rank it is on, I used the rank value for black (or a value calculated from the rank value for white) as the index for a couple of arrays from which it extracted a particular value. For example, black can promote on ranks 0-2, as they are designated internally. So, this code will return the element of the array with the same index as the rank value:

elem rank #0 ((b n v w c r s a m q) (b n v w c r s) (b n v w))

Since white promotes on ranks 9-11, I subtracted 9 to get a value from 0 to 2 for any rank promotions are allowed on or a number that is out of range for any other rank. So, this works similarly:

elem - rank #0 9 ((B N V W) (B N V W C R S) (B N V W C R S A M Q))

Since the last rank for black is 0, and the last for white is 11, and 11-9 is 2, these list sets of promotion options in the reverse order from each other.

Since promotion options are limited to captured pieces, each function calculates the intersection of the value above with the captured pieces. This looks like this for black:

intersection var cap elem rank #0 ((b n v w c r s a m q) (b n v w c r s) (b n v w))

Finally, I get to the part that is relevant to Obento Chess. Whether it can promote to a Pawn as a way of declining promotion depends on the rank but not on what has been captured. So Pawns were not included in the main lists of promotion options. Instead, it merges the intersection calculated above with the value of another array element. Again, the specific array element is a function of the rank. Here is what it looks like for black:

elem rank #0 (() (p) (p))

Since declining promotion is not an option for black on rank 0, an empty array is provided for the element with an index of 0. This is not necessary for white, as the rank it cannot decline promotion on has a higher index.

elem - rank #0 9 ((P) (P))

For Obento Chess, you might use functions like these:

def White_Pawn-Promote elem - rank #0 9 ((FP) (FP) (F));
def Black_Pawn-Promote elem rank #0 ((f) (fp) (fp));

You could handle promotion for the other promotable pieces with similar functions for each specific piece.

Much time passed, but still. On dark theme.

Indigo font on brown/dark-grey/purple background is hardly readable. Blue is just slightly better.

It's not like I've known this to be a problem and have just done nothing about it. Different browsers have different capabilities, and if what seems like an obvious problem to you goes on for a long time without being fixed, this could be because I am not experiencing the same problem as you are.

This particular problem is probably because I am using color-mix for the link colors instead of custom properties like I am for all the other color changes, and custom properties have better support than color-mix. So there may be an occasional browser that supports custom properties without supporting color-mix. However, I have not been able to locate one. While I have some old devices with old browsers that do not even support dark mode, every browser I have found to support dark mode supports it fully with both custom properties and color-mix.

So, first, I would like you to report to me which version of which browser on which operating system or device has this problem. Then I would like you to make sure everything is up-to-date. Make sure that your device is fully updated and that your browser is the latest version. After doing this, let me know whether the problem persists.

That's now fixed. Thanks.

I have now restored your password. The problem was that your code had an unclosed <script> tag at the end, and this enveloped the code that followed it. I switched your code from WYSIWYG to HTML and added the missing </script> tag. As long as you're including scripts in your code, avoid using WYSIWYG mode.

With the arms and the tail, it is looking a lot more like a centaur

Okay, I have published this. Note that the change I made to the HTML for the Chezs pieces is actually simpler than the tables you used to display the rest of the pieces. While you spread out information about a piece among multiple table rows, my modified code kept all the information about a piece together. Doing this makes the code easier to read, and it makes it easier to add new pieces. I will leave changing the rest of the code up to you as an exercise. It remains up to you whether you want to do it, but as I mentioned, it’s advantages do go beyond how is displays on phones.

It would be nice to include some cropped versions of these images with links to the 3D printer files.

I’m sorry to hear that. You have my condolences.

Please use full names and links when nominating games, and please name every game you nominate within your comment so that nominations can be properly documented.

The minimum would be to give dates of invention to put the information in a historical perspective.

I copied your list to the page and made the URLs relative. If you want to expand that list or add more content to the page, you can post it here.

This is obviously an April Fool’s Day joke. So it’s nothing to worry about if you use this rival site. Regardless, this is not the type of subject we have webpages for. So I will delete this page after posting this comment.

42 is the age Adams was when his first and only child was born, though he was 30 when he published Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Grant Acedrex is now the featured variant for April, 2024.

If the idea is to represent the move, the logical form in a set where the Amazon is a Staunton Knight with the head of a Staunton Queen mounted on top of it, would be a King's head on a Knight. The cross could be omitted for the non-royal case.

I'd trusted that Fergus had already thought of that and hadn't found a way to make it work, for some reason

I hadn't thought of it, because a crossless crown is still a crown. Having thought about it now, the cross is the main thing distinguishing the king's crown from the queen's. So, a knight with a crossless crown could easily be confused with an amazon. My thought has been to combine man and horse in some way.

It'll be interesting to see if anyone else can, as it would avoid using a 'reverse centaur' figurine. Maybe a Man's head (from Piececlopedia page for that) on top of a knight could be even better.

As crowns and miters are something worn on the head, some other kind of headgear, such as a helmet or a hat would probably be suitable for a piece with the additional powers of a man. While this might not work as easily for rook+man or bishop+man, these are also rook+ferz and bishop+wazir and are known by other names, such as dragon horse and dragon king. So maybe they could be represented in a different manner. Or all three might be represented by human face pieces like in the Superba set.

I have now fixed this with the solution that was already working for Shogi. It adds skip as the second move when the piece doesn't promote, which it now allows as a second move, and it doesn't ask which piece to promote to again if the move contains skip.

Indeed. Slavish adherence to perfectionism is a roadblock to getting anything done. It's better to do what we can for now even if it is imperfect. A bad solution may inspire someone to come up with a better one, or feedback may lead the person who came up with the initial solution to come up with a better one. In biological evolution, science, and other endeavors, improvement comes through trial and error. So we shouldn't be trying to discourage people from offering solutions we don't like. Instead, we should just critique solutions we don't like and try to offer better ones if we can.

It looks fine on my desktop or iPad, but on my phone, it requires either a lot of horizontal scrolling or zooming the page down to a small size to see all the images. So, I recommend switching from using tables to using flexbox. What I have in mind is replacing each table with a single row that will wrap when the screen isn't wide enough for it. To illustrate how it works, I have rewritten the Chess pieces section to use flexbox. I have styled it to resemble how your tables look, but if you decrease the width of your window, you should notice that it behaves differently. To make the other sections work the same way, all you have to do is consolidate the tables cells for each piece into a single div, replace each <td> with <div> and each </td> with </div>, and replace the table tags with <div class="piecerow"> and </div>.

Does anyone want to nominate or second any more games before the month is finished?

The crowned knight would be suitable for a game like Cavalier Chess or Fusion Chess, where the centaur is royal, but for a game such as Sac Chess, where it is not, something else may be more desirable. In my photograph for Sac Chess, I used Peter Ganine's Superba pieces for the so-called crowned pieces, because these have human faces, and this conveyed the idea of being able to move like a man.

The second image is hard for me to see as a centaur. Without the horse head, it is hard to make out that the neck and what's left of the mane are horse parts. So my first impression of it was that it was a weird abstract shape that for some reason has a curve where other pieces don't. It would work better for me if the horse part were more obvious.

What I know is that Fairy chess is a term that we use in // to chess variant or non orthodox chess, etc. It doesn't mean a chess with fairies. I know plenty chess variants, I know none with fairies.

As a fairy, it's a symbolic representation of fairy chess in general, not a literal representation of a particular fairy piece. As a princess, though, it is a literal representation of a particular fairy piece, and the fairy wings help indicate that this is the princess of fairy chess rather than the princess of Jetan or some other game with a princess. They also serve the purpose of distinguishing this piece from a queen, since the pieces flanking the logo should resemble usual Chess pieces without being mistaken for them.

Fairies or princesses, I'm not going to spend time to discuss Disney movies. Everyone has got what I meant, the rough idea. When my daughter was <8 years she was playing with little fairies or princesses some wings.

One thing I appreciate about this logo is how it balances the masculine and the feminine. The dragon horse is fiercely masculine, and the princess is gently feminine in a way that helps tame the ferocity of the dragon horse. While it is natural for little girls to be more into feminine things like princesses and fairies than boys are, it is also natural for men to appreciate what is feminine. It has become a cliche for both knights and dragons to be into princesses, and John Carter, a masculine pulp fiction hero, is known for his devotion to Dejah Thoris, a princess of Mars. As a straight male, I find that femininity is something I like about women, and it is something I want to see in the portrayal of a female Chess variant piece. Also, perhaps because I grew up with Brian Froud's Faeries book, I have long had an appreciation for fairies that has nothing to do with Tinkerbell. Disney may do what it can to capitalize on the love little girls have for fairies and princesses, but it does not have a monopoly on either concept, and I have not drawn on Disney representations to create this piece image.

And I know what a centaur is.

I never meant to imply otherwise. I was just pointing out the difficulty in portraying one in something short of a figurine piece.

I even took the challenge to represent one in 3D with the bottom of a knight and the top of warrior. My result is not a cute as your figurine but at least it looks like a chess piece in the same manner that a Staunton knight looks as a chess piece and not as a horseman figurine.

I look forward to seeing what is looks like when you create a page for your pieces. Things are now set up that you should now be able to do so. But let me know if you need to upload file formats that are not currently supported, as I remain unfamiliar with file formats for 3D printers and have not yet included support for uploading them in the File Manager.

This page is merely a stub, and I would like to make it a more informative resource on the subject of fairy chess. What resources or websites can we link to that cover fairy chess?

you never change your mind

I do change my mind, and you even helped persuade me to remove the frog and an earlier fairy princess. But there are also matters on which I will stand my ground.

That recommendation didn't work, but after I reinstated the previous revision, the WZ piece showed up in Firefox. I then checked Edge, and it still wasn't showing up. Since I had used the Reload Skip Cache button in Firefox, I used the Hard Refresh Button in Edge to reload it with a cleared cache, and then it did show up.

I follow exactly the same path when I create 3D pieces or, even, when I write. I do, change, re-do, re-change, re-write, re-draw until I get satisfied. And we are probably tens of people here doing that in our hobbies, painting, sculpting, composing music, etc. Call it creation, call it art, what matters is the result. Appreciating the result is certainly personal also. Here we are talking about the representation of chess variant pieces, not about getting a nice-looking images. My opinion is that you got very nice results in some cases:

Thanks, I appreciate that you understand that.

The Dragon on the Dark Welcome Page is very sophisticated, but it does look as a very nice chess piece.

It's a Dragon Horse, not simply a Dragon, and it is probably based on a Japanese work of art representing one. I have seen a similar, though simpler, version of this image used in an iconographic Shogi set.

Now, I don't like at all the Princess on the Dark Page. First not sure that a Princess is a good target, a name that we rarely use nowadays for CV

Does fairy chess ring any bells? As I've mentioned on this page and in an earlier comment to you, this piece represents fairy chess. That's why it's a fairy. It could have been an empress as easily as a princess, as each is a fairy chess piece that could be made to resemble a queen. In fact, I have an earlier comment that shows one possible logo with an empress instead of a princess. These two fairy pieces were my main choices, as fairies are usually represented as girls or women with butterfly wings.

it won't stand on a board

I think you're imagining that the piece is uniformly made of a single material like a 3D printed piece might be. With a heavy base and light wings, there is no reason it shouldn't stand on a board.

Princess with wings, this is a Disney cartoon cliché.

Can you name a single Disney princess with wings? Tinkerbell and the Blue Fairy may have wings, but they are not princesses. Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Jasmine, Rapunzel, the one from The Princess and the Frog, and the two from Frozen are all humans without wings.

The Centaur just looks as a female centaur on a base.

The Centaur is male. I think you're making the same mistake you made before of confusing the source image with the final result. I explicitly explained that the female image I posted in a comment was a source image I used to begin a series of generations that resulted in the male centaur used on the page.

A nice female centaur maybe but this is not a chess piece. Similar critic for some other pieces.

There are figurine Chess pieces, and it is hard to represent a centaur with a piece that does not show its lower body, as a centaur's distinguishing feature is the difference between its upper and lower body.

The game described here is similar to my own Eurasian Chess. It has the same pieces plus the Elephants from Xiangqi or maybe Janggi, as I saw multiple references to Korean Elepants in the translated comments. It also uses the same characters as I did for the Bishop and Queen. It would be worthwhile to have a page on it here, but the machine translation I got is not very good. Could you help with that? I could write it up if I know what the rules and pieces are.

Since a centaur is part man and part horse, I think the one on the left, which has a helmet and four horseshoes, works better than the horseshoe piece on the right.

Or we are several people designing Staunton-like 3D pieces for printing. Importing a .stl into Meshmixer we could make very nice 2D images.

Those are suitable for going on individual Piececlopedia pages if someone would like to take charge of that. I'm not the one to do that, since I don't have a 3D printer or know anything about the image formats.

I nominate Jean-Louis. ;)

I don't think he is interested. Would you be interested in doing that? As the person who has made the most pieces for 3D printing, you would be more qualified than the rest of us to handle this. If you're familiar enough with HTML, I could set you up as an editor and give you the ability to update pages.

I am a Chinese video uploader, and have been interested in chess variants for about 10 years. As far as I know, the name 弩 has been used for a translation for vao since 2014

Since that year coincides with the beginning of your interest in Chess variants, I am wondering if this usage actually began in 2014 or if that's simply as far back as you're personally aware. My own use of 矢 goes back to 2001, but I am not Chinese.

I made a couple changes to the dark theme logo.

1. I replaced the Knight/Camel piece, which had represented the Pushmi-Pullyu, with the new Ram/Ox image for that piece.
2. I removed the stuff hanging around the waist of the fairy princess. In an earlier version of the image, this had been long hair. Thanks to some changes I made to a source image I used to produce new images, she became short-haired. The stuff around her waist could be interpreted as cloth hanging from her sleeves, but it seemed a bit weird and out-of-place.