Comments by FergusDuniho
In the Interactive Diagrams I inserted as main diagram in existing articles I always respected the design choice of the author, trying to make the Interactive Diagram resemble it as closely as possible.
That is usually appropriate, especially when the author is still active on the site.
Should there be a systematic effort to eliminate all piece representations other than Alfaerie?
No, but it's usually appropriate to replace Utrecht with Alfaerie. The Utrecht style was frequently used on pages, because it got a head start on other sets. It was created by the site's founder, and he created some JavaScript code for displaying diagrams on pages. Since then, David Howe and I produced some better looking sets out of Chess fonts. David's Alfaerie set became particularly popular, and many people added new pieces to it. When I make a diagram, I choose the most suitable set for that game. This is sometimes Alfaerie, and it is sometimes not, but it is never Utrecht.
I put it in a table, and it seems to be working now. I also copied some things from your earlier Interactive Diagram in the comments.
Was this on a mobile device? On my PC that Diagram seems to work fine. But on my tablet it didn't.
No, I do all my development on my desktop. I am using my Fire tablet now, and it is working.
I'm making an Interactive Diagram for this game, but it is currently not showing the moves of pieces. It did initially, but then it stopped, and restoring the HTML to when it was working didn't seem to help. Also, how do you use Betza notation to specify castling for this game?
Team-Mate Chess. Play this variant in which it takes a team to checkmate the King on Jocly.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The file is at
/home/chessvariants/public_html/play/jocly/dist/browser/games/chessbase/team-mate-rules.html
Breakthrough Chess. Pieces must "break through" a zone of neutral blocks. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]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.
How about obstacles? It would also cover a game like Eight-Stone Chess.
New Submissions for Review. A listing of all submissions still awaiting editorial approval.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]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.
was there a change in the initial submission scripts that didn't save categories properly, or is there something wrong with the edit form's fetching of them?...
They're not being saved properly, as the Categories column in the database is empty for these pages, including for one I recently created, and the edititem.php script accurately reads the categories for pages that have them.
De Vasa Chess. Play this hexagonal variant on a rhombus board with Jocly.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]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.
Mansindam (Pantheon Tale). A variant that combines 'drop' rule and strong pieces, and there is no draw. (9x9, Cells: 81) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]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.
Breakthrough Chess. Pieces must "break through" a zone of neutral blocks. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Ludii identifies a different game by the name Breakthrough Chess.
A different game, played with Xiangqi pieces. Played on the squares of half a Xiangqi board but using all the pieces. (8x4, Cells: 32) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]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.
Based on further tests using my monitor's ePaper mode, which turns the screen monochrome, I would recommend #BDBDBD for the shade of grey. I got this value by taking the highest value in the blue color of #5984BD and applying it to every component of the color. The current value of #909090 has each component only slightly higher than the middle value of that color, which may account for why they look more alike on a monochrome display.
On e-ink screens, the grey pieces look more different in color from the blue pieces than the red pieces do, though they still look closer in color to the blue pieces than they do to the white pieces. I tested both versions on my Likebook Mars and my Kindle Scribe, and I compared a different version on each device side-by-side, then switched them. Based on these tests, I would recommend grey over red, and I would recommend a lighter grey over the current shade of grey.
Since the red and blue pieces appear to be the same color on the e-ink screen of my Likebook Mars, I am posting this alternate version of the setup to test how it looks on the same device.
Chess Variant Inventors. Find out which inventors have the most games listed here.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]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.
Terachess II. An unrealistic summit on a very large board of 16x16 squares and 128 pieces.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]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.
Ultima. Game where each type of piece has a different capturing ability. (8x8, Cells: 64) (Recognized!)[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]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 includes a link to Robert Abbott's article in World Game Review. This magazine was published by Michael Keller, who is no longer allowed to use the name. However, Keller reports on a page about the magazine on his website that he plans on putting together The WGR Index of Chess Variants, which would include Paul Yearout's articles on Ultima.
Team-Mate Chess. Play this variant in which it takes a team to checkmate the King on Jocly.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]This page is missing some graphics in the description of the rules.
Team-Mate Chess. Variant with 8 different pieces, none of which is able to checkmate a bare king on its own. (8x8, Cells: 64) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]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.
Double Move Double Chess. The game is played on a 8x16 chessboard with each player in control of two complete armies.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]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.
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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.