The most obvious difference with Cheshire Cat Chess is when n>1.  But also the elimination of draw rules makes it interesting, IMO.  An insufficient material endgame, for example, becomes a puzzle similar to Joust Chess.

I've added a tag square-removal to track similar games.

I agree that this is really very far out on the chess variant spectrum.  I don't think I'd say it's more a poker variant than a chess variant though.  I tend to err on the side of inclusiveness; Greg?

Actually, I think it would be a better game with more poker elements; a matching pair/triple, or flush/straight (but only three cards) should confer some bonus in the chess phase?

And, if the game is to stay, the page needs a fair bit of formatting work.

Welcome, Zied and Ola!

The page is no longer empty, but the images are external, and do not work.  (The links do work, interestingly.)

I see you've also included some attempts at local image inclusion, but they point to nonexistant files here.  I've edited the first one to point to the location I would expect your images to be hosted (@Fergus, is this documented somewhere for users?), but I don't find any files there either; have you uploaded any images yet (there's a link near the bottom of the page when you are logged in)?

I did not understand it from the text on this page, but reading the linked description of Bushi Shogi, I think I now understand it.  I don't think the cannons actually play any role, except to denote the two sides.  A sample game on this page would be helpful.

It would be very hard to call this a chess variant, or even a shogi variant, IMO.

I've added the checkmating potential note to this page.

I wanted to call out that the "vocabulary" section here seems to disagree with our current definition of adjacent in the glossary, when referring to hexagonal variants.  I think such sections in the Piececlopedia should generally be replaced to a link to the glossary, but we should consider whether we like the glossary definition of "adjacent" for hexagonal boards.

While I don't get the author information block displayed on this page, I assume (based on the link on my own page and the itemID of this page) that the link is 
https://www.chessvariants.com/index/managefiles.php?itemid=MSphantom
which gives me the error:

The directory  /membergraphics/MSphantom/  does not exist.

Trying to navigate directly to the folder also fails.

and if you'll allow the humble 8x8, you can test out that endgame:
https://www.chessvariants.com/membergraphics/MSinteractive-diagrams/EGT.html?betza=WAD&name=Champion&img=champion
(I really like this thing; thanks H.G.!)

I noticed that the Champion's Piececlopedia page has an incorrect diagram (due to the new marker code).  I'll fix that and add a link to the 8x8 checkmating practice after work today.

I don't understand the phrase "Draws are possible; stalemates are not."  But in the addendum, point 3 is pretty clear:  

If you cannot make a move during your turn, you lose.

So the Vf1xf7 move H.G. brings up is actually a winning move.

I get that the Templar is a knight plus captureless-ox, but the other pieces that move like a "Templar but not as an Ox" should instead just say they move like a knight or <whatever>; I think that would be substantially clearer.

The Giraffe's description wasn't clear to me, but the movement diagram mostly fixes that.  But, is the Giraffe blocked by a piece diagonally adjacent?

Very nice!  I was considering attempting this, but using diffs instead of saving the entire revision (but with the final, and perhaps various intermediate versions, saved in full so that lots of diffs wouldn't need to be processed to display a page).  That might be something to still try, if the size of the revisions table is a concern.

I can't see revision counts from any of the Edit links that I know about (but can in this New Submissions list), nor a link to the revisions.php script.  The editor-use Edit page has text concerning revisions, but the link doesn't work, and the author-use Edit page hasn't been changed recently.

And a separate issue (for editors): does loading the Edit Index Information (for editors) page take a long time to load the inventor/author dropdowns for anyone else?  If so, I'd like to move those into a new script, so that categorization, primary/secondary links, etc. and approval can be done more quickly.

@H.G.,

The "missing description" refers to the "Short description" in the first page of the member submission process.  That field is not available (at present) from the edit index information page (either authors' or editors'); instead the "What's new" field is available.  Editors can edit that field through the edit links page, so for now you can just request the change.

The pawn promotion zone isn't entirely clear, but I suppose it's the four squares on the mentioned diagonal e8-h5 together with (when a pawn captures diagonally due N) the diagonal f8-h6?

I'd suggest moving the "motivational" setup to the notes.  Having it in the introduction, at first read I thought that was your game!

I fixed a bug on this page: the query ordered by CreationDate but tried to group for display based on ModifiedDate; I think here having the query order by ModifiedDate makes more sense.  However, there are a handful of pages here with ModifiedDate=0000-00-00, which get tacked on at the end.

@Fergus, I'm not sure what causes a page will have this degenerate ModifiedDate?  Even your test page that has revisions in the table suffers that affliction.

I'd guess it's seeing a 2-leap followed by a bishop move inward as legal?  And that doesn't matter for the Aanca because those same squares can be reached legitimately by a shorter path.

Ah, so I was wrong about the promotion zone!  Glad to have that clarified!

The Subject entry box is wider than my screen. When I press Preview, make some changes, and press Preview again, the preview is empty. (This was before logging in, if that matters.) There's an Edit and View (and [*]) link on the preview that doesn't work (and probably shouldn't be there). When I draft a message and then try to log in, I get an error along the lines of "You must be logged in as the original author to edit a comment" (this was after Preview, in case that matters).

We should add

1. a link to a markdown guide; since Parsedown uses github-flavored markdown, maybe https://guides.github.com/features/mastering-markdown/ ?
2. possibly a short list of common markdown?

bold emph emph, emph

header

header2

Please see the thread "The new editcomment.php script" for discussions around the comment input form.

This looks pretty neat! Unfortunately I don't have Zillions to play the implementation; any other editors have it want to have a go before reviewing?

Done.

I don't remember the What's New and Description ever being the same...? The What's New is generally not a good description of the page, just pointing out what has changed on the page ("added example" or "modified endgame conditions", for example).

As to why Descriptions historically haven't been easy to edit I can't say, but Fergus seems to have recently expressed interest in changing that.

So there is an item ID, a summary and a description. The item ID determines the URL (and I will never repeat the mistake to make that very long!).

Right so far.

The index will list item ID + description, the comment headers will list summary + description. Apparently summary and description are set to the same text when first submitting a new article? It is the summary that can be controlled by the author through the 'Edit index information', as 'Item name'.

I don't think this is right.

The Summary is also called the Item Name, and the latter name is perhaps clearer. The Description is a one-sentence(ish) blurb. The ItemID is a unique permanent identifier, which the URL is also based on. Then there are Index Entries, with a Link Text and Link Description; these are used on search pages (except What's New, which has its own description), and the header on comment threads use the Item Name and the Link Description (???).

When you first submit a page, you provide an Item Name and a Description. An ItemID is created based on that Item Name (generally with a prefix MS, MP, etc. and with spaces replaced with hyphens, etc.). The ItemID is meant to be a permanent unique id, and the URL for the page is based on this ID as well.

The Description that you provide when you first submit a page just populates the initial Index Entry, together with the Item Name. Most pages will only ever have this one Index Entry, but you can have more; see in particular the Piececlopedia, where a piece with multiple common names is given and Index Entry for each name, for ease of discovery. (We also distinguish "Primary" index entries, and the query can filter down to only those primary entries if you don't want the duplicates.)

You can update the Item Name. This will not update the ItemID nor URL (because those are meant to be permanent), so these can diverge. Also, changing the Item Name doesn't update the Index Entry, which might be a little confusing. I think users can't add index entries (perhaps to prevent exploiting them for greater visibility), but updating them may be made available.

I would also like to have descriptions changed for the following pages...

done.

The board graphic has two wizards behind the royals, while the ASCII board has two revealers.

This is interesting. I'd like a more descriptive name for the variant, but I don't have one to suggest right now...

On fools, the paragraph seems to mean that neither fools nor kings can move such that the fool "attacks" the king. The convoluted language comes I think in part because the fool cannot capture any pieces at all, and so the author is trying to avoid the word "attacks" or its variations.

Several of this author's pages say just "castling is free," which I can only attribute to the historical rule? I haven't read all of them to see whether they elaborate somewhere.

I'm also confused about the hunter movement:

...The hunter can't jump over any agent when it's travelling either diagonally or orthogonally. When travelling purely orthogonally, the hunter can never even jump any agent located on squares of opposite color. ...

The second sentence here seems to be redundant, unless diagonal movement is supposed to allow jumping over opposite-color squares?

An observation: this game is not symmetric.

I think it is mirror symmetric, and I think the confusion stems from "left for white and right for black". I believe the author means "files earlier in the alphabet" for both, and the different handedness comes from players generally sitting on opposite sides of the board.

(Imagine pawns being wrapped around king's starting position)

In the starting position, remove the major pieces. Treat the pawn row as a cellophane film, and pull it tight around the king, "sticking" the e pawn where it is. The d and f pawns also get stuck where they are, the c pawn gets pulled down into d1, the b pawn further pulled to d0 (offboard), and the a pawn down and around into e0. Similarly for the right half of the pawns, and now the position of the pawn relative to the king is the same direction that that rank's pawn grants power to the king. I do think this is a good mnemonic; anybody good at a quick animation? :P

1. I don't understand the pawn drop rules. Am I allowed to drop a pawn that attacks the opponent's Jade if they have no pieces that could capture the pawn? If so, do I win?

2. I really don't understand Jitai. When exactly does it become effective? What are the "props" currently mentioned? If both players have fewer than 31 points do they both lose (is that a draw?)?

3. I'd suggest the first promotion rule being changed from "are promoted" to "may be promoted", since it seems the intention is that promotion is always optional.

4. In defining Sennichite, "phase" and "shape" should be replaced by "board position" or "game state", if one of those accurately captures your meaning. You mention "Highground" in the playoff, but that doesn't seem to exist in this game?

This looks promising to me.

Having such mobile royal pieces (even limited to two sliding, which I overlooked at first) may lead to indecisive games. I think your suggestion for winning after capturing 2-3 royals is a good one.

The short-range phoenix and giraffe maybe would be better to start up one rank? And the rook, bishop, knightrider back?

@Fergus, @Greg: are gmail-address registrations possible then? There's an email in the main inbox looking to do so.

I'd suggest different piece images for the tower and guard; especially FIDE pieces' images being used for different pieces is confusing. (Maybe the war machine and elephant?)

I'm also curious how putting both Men (slower) on one side and both Knights (faster) on the other affects play.

I also like the new piece images.

I don't understand the part of fourfold repetition concerning checks. Could you clarify that please? (I guess the main point is that "forcing" the fourfold repetition by chasing loses instead of draws, but how is that formalized? If the position that is repeated four times includes one side being in check, then that side wins? What does the last clause [about checking consecutively] mean?)

Very innovative!

Would the "advance" step of a barrier be better phrased as one end jumping over the other? If it is the same, it seems slightly better in that it's more obviously one "step".

With just the first alternate game-end rule (capture a poisoned pawn and lose), this seems like something that might exist (but I can't find it with a quick search, though that's hindered by the "poisoned pawn variations" of FIDE chess). The other rules probably make this new.

Given that "poisoned pawn" does represent a situation in FIDE, I'd like to suggest a different name here, but one doesn't come immediately to mind.

Also, please clarify if you choose one of your pawns to be poisoned, or can you choose one of your opponent's instead? Given the last rule, this isn't obviously a bad idea if allowed.

I've been unable to view any of our php pages on my phone (Android, with Firefox, Chrome, and DuckDuckGo) the past couple of days. I can switch to "Desktop site" and it works fine, but the mobile version just displays the off-white background of the site and no content.

Thanks for adding the images on same-line restrictions. I think the knight one could be improved by showing that the knight can continue on its same line (if I'm understanding the text rules correctly).

I think this page would benefit from some discussion on the reasoning behind the restrictions, especially as compared to other double-move variants (I've added the tag double-move to as many as I could find). I'm also unclear why the variant has three different names, only the first of which seems at all related to the game's mechanics (but I think suggests somewhat the opposite of the same-line restrictions...).

Hi Christine!

That's how we generally manage it, yes: start the post as a Game Page, and an editor can change the type, presumably to a Piece Article to match part 1.

One other question has occurred to me, and I don't see it addressed (but maybe just missed it). If the first move reveals check, can the second move capture the king?

Looks good! First pass comments:

This strikes me as being much more than a privacy policy; maybe some of it (e.g. the password security section, the OpenID note) can be factored out to a separate page. One thing to consider is how much obligation we have to alert users to updates to the privacy policy: keeping it slim makes it less likely we will want to make a change.

I would suggest adding something about the person deletion policy here.

For what it's worth, this chameleon is listed in the Fairy Glossary of the Problemist / British Chess Problem Society, and is featured in a number of puzzles at Julia's Fairies problem site.

We should tackle the external images; one of:

1. bypass the upload limit temporarily
2. shrink the image data size without hurting quality too much
3. add a way for editors to hide the external image warning block (case-by-case)
4. maybe OK certain external sites? github ought to be pretty stable?

For Harding's article: Dead links is a regular part of niche internet interests, unfortunately. I would use the Wayback Machine archive. Additionally, it might be worth adding that piece as being invented "in the 1960s by George Botterill", and changing "Harding's Transcendental Prelate" to "Botterill's" in the anchorite paragraph.

For naming on this page, I disagree in part with H.G.: if we come to some consensus here, then it will probably trickle into variants. People are welcome to name pieces however they want in variants, absolutely, but anyone finding this page before re-inventing the piece will be at least slightly inclined to use this name. If we can't come to anything close to consensus, then I'd suggest the article title to actually be something like "Wazir-then-bishop", and anything for the text.

Personally, I think avoiding Aanca is best (but of course with an index entry for Aanca pointing to this page, and I would suggest mentioning earlier in the article the Aanca name). I'd be pretty happy with either Anchorite or Acromantula. (I get the preference for non-modern myth, but don't think it's more important than other considerations.) I also like Manticore.

So a pawn on d4/e5 can only switch between those two locations (similarly for d5/e4), until an opportunity to capture arises? I guess the four-directional capture partially makes up for their dramatically lower ability to promote? How have pawn structures developed, in playtesting?

Why convert the knight as well? (It might be worth noting the common name for that piece, the camel.)

Very interesting! But I also have a hard time understanding this all at once.

You should give prominent definitions for "end zone" and "end field". I think the whole page would be easier to grasp quickly if you briefly described some of the rules earlier: the three options for a turn, and how pieces "throw" the stones. Then later you can clarify the differences between stones and peculiarities of piece-stone interactions. And any of the piece descriptions that can be slimmed down would be helpful (e.g., the pieces that don't have special stone-placement rules don't need to reiterate how they place stones).

(If the standard page sections are too restrictive, you can move everything into the Introduction section and add headers yourself.)

Is this website no longer being updated?

Yes it is! The best places to see what's going on (IMO, and omitting Game Courier) are the What's New page and the listing of all comments

You can also see the listing of submitted-but-unpublished pages here; viewing the pages listed there requires being logged in.

I see that Andrew Kuess' variant page linked in the previous comment is still "currently hidden pending approval by the Chess Variant Pages editorial staff."

Hm, yes, we should've at least commented on that one. I saw it and passed on review at the time, and promptly forgot all about it. I'll go and make some comments now. On that note,

If there's still an admin actively approving new variants, let me know and I'll add the best variants I've invented to this site.

We have three editors currently active in approving submissions (two recent ones were brought on, see a few posts earlier in this thread, but I haven't seen much of them), but it's all volunteered time, so sometimes we get bogged down. Please do submit your game(s)! I'd suggest starting with just one, so that if we have generic feedback on it that would apply to your other submissions, you can incorporate it while writing.

Christine reported (a while before the OS update) that the zip was missing on this page as well as Gods on Pluto (and probably others). On one of the pages, the member upload folder was missing, and in the other it was empty (but in playing with them, I think I created the missing folder).

Just now I tried to copy the zip from the ZoG site, using the link in this page. When trying to upload using the Upload/Manage Files script, I get this error:

Upload of /home/chessvariants/public_html/membergraphics/MZshortrange-project/The_ShortRange_Project.zip was allowed but failed! The cause of failure is unknown.

We already have a Category for Round...did we ever settle on a reconciliation between tags and categories?

I would prefer to keep the categories, if only to have a short list of important information; when posting a new game, checking a few of those boxes is (or eventually will be) easier than perusing all the existing tags. The main question to answer, if we agree that this is worth keeping, is how to reconcile the overlap. I think a mechanism to include the categories as tags would serve that purpose fairly well, but would require an efficient way to index the pages of each category (dynamically, since pages' categories can change).

Indeed, one of the first uses of tags to my mind was to subcategorize the "Shape" category. Hence #Shape:Board and #Shape:Cells.

I think we should keep 2D; while no one will peruse it directly, they might be searching for something and want to exclude non-2D variants. (This does suggest though that some very large tags might need rethinking on how to list their pages.) Also, maybe dimensions should be a numeric parameter instead. (Note that "4D" is actually supposed to mean "4 or more dimensions".)

"Usual Equipment" is usual for people who want to sit down to a regular chess set and play a variant. I would suggest, if tags rather than categories, that #UsualEquipment be its own tag, and each of the deviation types can be a completely separate tag, applicable to both usual-equipment and different-equipment games. "Modest" is probably useful especially for people wanting not-very-different games; see e.g. the comment thread on this SE post.

On Crossover, I think there will be some base games (e.g. Checkers) that deserve child tags, but if a base game has only one (maybe two) chess crossovers, then it should just be tagged with the parent Crossover. (I wouldn't oppose, however, individual tags even for one-game bases. It makes the tag itself more informative, if less useful for searching. If we restructure tags in a way that makes recursive searching possible, then this would work.)

Single player and multiplayer could be replaced by the number of players numerical field.

And yes, I think numerical fields should be kept separate rather than incorporated into tags. That gives us more flexible searching ("at least 90 cells but at most 130"), and I can't imaging a parametrized tag ("#CellCount=x") looking good.

I don't think individual pieces should be tags. I'd rather that be an explicit database table. But I do think "usual equipment" and "FIDE+compounds" and similar classes of piece sets could be useful as tags.

I agree with "Board" because of terrain. Maybe something even more generic like "Playing Field", except that I prefer the brevity of "Board".

Aurelian, for this and the other two flavors, please add some links to the Piececlopedia where appropriate, or flesh out details of the pieces. (Notably, the joker and vulture need some explanation, while ferz, dabbabah, knightrider, cannons might not be obvious to a new reader.) It might be worth also linking to the other Apothecary series.

Also, and maybe this is just me, but the board colors hurt my eyes. And I removed the "Usual Equipment" category checks, because this does not use just the usual chess equipment.

What happens to a king after abdicating? Removed from board? If so, I presume that removal can't discover check on the newly crowned prince?

Do pawns only move 3 or 2 squares, or can they move fewer?

@Kevin, You had the website field populated instead of the image field, and the link you provided had our server's folder structure (starting /home/public_html I think) rather than the URL. I've fixed both.

@all, We should perhaps have a select-upload-and-use button on the Edit Person form, rather than the separate Upload for files in the membergraphics/@personid folder then specifying that URL in the Edit Person form. The latter does provide some more flexibility, but we can have both, I'd imagine.

Hmm, the folder is mis-specified. It links to /membergraphics/MZtheshortrangep/, but the real folder is /membergraphics/MZshortrange-project/. Since Fergus just fixed this, I'd prefer to leave it and see if there's some continuing problem; but the fix is reasonably straightforward.

The Classified Encyclopedia has an entry for Quantum Chess, but it's a different game (seemingly the one described in Variant Chess 17); did this game appear in the original Encyclopedia and get replaced/removed in the new one?

H. G. Muller wrote on 2021-05-02 UTC
I still hope we can implement a solution that allows members to do this without any editorial help. It shouldn't be that difficult to have a 'custom' option in the piece-set selector of Game Courier, and a text entry where the user can specify the directory where he uploaded the images.

I'm not an expert on Game Courier, but I want to make sure this doesn't get lost in the comments. I agree this would be nice. I can have a look into it if Fergus or Greg don't have time in the near future.

... I think the site would also benefit from a more organized presentation of the available piece sets. There are may sets now that are hidden in membergraphics directories, which people who could benefit from them would never find.

I agree. I do think that some editorial review should happen though. Perhaps a new page type should be added, the graphics home extended to query those page types, and Courier set to look for either the traditional folder or membergraphics folders attached to pages of that type.

Adam DeWitt wrote on 2021-05-02 UTC
I am inclined to agree. Also, I would like to know how to group sets together...

I don't know anything about this right now, but wanted to quote it so that it's on the top of my (our) mind(s) as we work this out.

Thanks for all this!

First, I generally think that these interactive diagrams should be promoted from comments into the articles themselves, unless they are somewhat experimental and would require frequent editing by someone other than the author or an editor.

The list of these can still exist and linked to as "play"ables. But it may work to turn it into an index, rather than you maintaining it. That may work out best with some other structural change though (adding a field to the member submissions e.g.), so I won't push for this in the very near-term.

I'll try to add links to the other resources in appropriate places; thanks for all the thought about where they best fit.

It's great to see some of these old resources preserved! Great work on tracking it down and digitizing it, and thanks to Joseph for providing the text!

But, are we allowed to post this here? Do we have the appropriate permissions?

Apparently it relies on the diagram designer to display a period as some marker. And for some reason it doesn't.

I've noted this before. We used to allow a period for a movement marker.

https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?id=37824

I started to look into a fix last night, but was having problems connecting to the server. I'll try again tonight. If I can't find a clever enough search-and-replace method, I might consider a spinoff (legacy version) DiagramDesigner for these pages.

Per Joe's excellent suggestion, this thread is for discussion of other places on the web where chess variant enthusiasts explore, play, and discuss variants.

The first thing to mention is our menu item Web, where the most prominent and permanent of these should be promoted.

ChessArena.io

a multiplayer real-time (in the sense of "not turn-based", a la Kung Fu Chess) "io-style game". Beta version announced on reddit, direct link to game. I've wasted a bit of time on this one.

BullDog Chess

I've had trouble in the past tracking down concrete information here, but it seems to be a family of variants played by a group at Chess.com. The club's homepage.

ChessCraft

A phone-app game featuring customizable variant play. Active community on Discord, and a dedicated subreddit. Homepage.

Kung Fu Chess, the app

An app playing (a version of) Kung Fu Chess, including multiplayer matching (but rarely anybody free) or an AI opponent (not especially strong). I hesitate to mention this one, except that perhaps it will increase players and I can try it against a real person. It's also perhaps good practice for ChessArena. Play page.

https://www.chessvariants.com/graphics.dir/galactic/

(I found it by viewing an image in a new tab then cutting off the filename from the URL. I'll add the direct link to the page next time I get the chance.)

I think I'm fine with the (pseudo)underline for h2, but the under/overlining of h5 makes it stand out more than h3-4.

By the time someone gets to h6, I don't think much distinction really needs to be made; boldface but otherwise p-style would be nearly enough. (Since you pointed out wikipedia's, note that h4-h6 are all the same, and h3 only differs from those in font-size.)

What notation should be used for turning the shields? There is some precedent here, but I wonder if the inventor has something else in mind.

The knight rule is a little weird. But using the 16 main+hippogonal directions would be terrible. Using the lame Mao+Moa could work: the piece could be blocked along one path and shield-blocked from capturing along the other; but that's rather more complicated than just "knights ignore shields", and so detracts a bit from the simplicity of the variant as-is. Choosing one path (orth+diag) could work?

For computer graphics, I think H.G.'s flexible overlaying could work? We'd just need a shield graphic to rotate and put under/over the pieces.

@Fergus, I'm not sure what's wrong with this page. The Item, Index entry, and Member Submission all look fine, but the contents of the page give a 404. (There's at least one other member-submitted Link page with this issue, but I don't remember which it was.)

I'm starting this subject thread for broad submissions of mathematical or scientific subjects that involve chess.

To kick it off, 3D chess is Turing Complete.

It might make things more compact if the movement diagrams were on smaller boards. I'd also suggest sorting them in the same groups you introduced pieces in. (Alphabetical isn't as helpful: anyone searching for a piece can search its name in the page.)

Your hawk is the gnu, and your xiphodon is the manticore.

As in your other page, different colors for the movement indicators would be better. Using dots instead of coloring the entire square would be nicer, and can be done with an ! or # in the diagram designer (which would need to be url-encoded, so don't just edit the URLs).

Those look much nicer, thanks!

With multiple-royal games being so rare, a few more words about your game-end condition would be nice. In particular, it isn't really necessary to "checkmate" either of the pieces, as forking them is sufficient (if I've understood the reddit post of the game correctly).

In the equipment section, what was the purpose of the chess set? You'd need more pawns, and so I'd expect you'd rather just use the checkers pieces...?

The pawn "temporary promotions" are interesting. The penultimate row seems to suffer the most from having the dodecahedron's forwardmost moves cut off by the board. I imagine analyzing pawn moves becomes more difficult when each move also changes its abilities. I think it would be worth emphasizing that the additional powers are only for capture (right?).

Do you have any analysis of mating material?

The table layout for piece descriptions wasn't great on my mobile browser, so I've changed that. It's still not great, as the description text block will keep a few short words on the right and then break everything else to below the image, but I've run out of time to work on it right now.

The CECV doesn't specify castling rules on the larger board. I would assume it's the same as ordinary queenside, but can anyone check the what the Zillions implementation has done? I'll also check Ed's java implementation when I have the chance to use a java-applet-supporting browser.

(a reminder to myself to add the Promotion-Zone tag after this is published)

The tag description has been overwritten; not sure if there's a crossed wire in the scripts, or if it was a user error.

Also, when entering a (this) comment on a tag, the link back to the page following "Comment on the page" is malformed.

Is there any appetite for supporting markdown for member submitted pages? (I've caught myself trying to enter markdown already...)

I expect this was from the same script glitch or user error as the parent tag. This comment is to flag the issue in either case. (Does anyone get alerted to comments on tag pages?)

Do we have histories on tag descriptions to restore? (That's not so important here, since I can't imagine we had a particularly interesting description before, but for future reference?)

It looks like the Game Courier play-counts, but I'm not sure how it got there.

I build such a table in the ad hoc reporting page, but I don't write it back to the database. I could have created it at some point in developing the script? (The script's last change was in Dec 2018.)

Here's a diagram with a playable AI (my first, so let's see how this goes):

(So far this looks right. Having the defaults correctly detected for the common pieces means all that needed to be checked here is promotion and castling; really nice H.G.! But specifying promotion choices seemed finicky; without explicitly giving the knight's label it wasn't recognized, and depending on the order of the promotion choices I lost other choices as well.)

I've updated the link description and published this page.

I found the "en passant...is identical to the regular chess Pawn" for the Maasai a little disconcerting because it doesn't address inter-type interaction. Of course, you address that in the Rules section. Maybe just add a note to the piece description that these are addressed in the Rules section?