Comments by benr

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?

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.)

That's probably fine, yes.

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?)

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?)

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

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.

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)

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.

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).

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.

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.

@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.)

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.

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.)

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.)

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.

@H.G., The change was to conform better to FFEN notation; together with that change occuring back in 2018, I think fixing the handful of pages in the comment I linked to last time is the better solution.

Here's the comments recording the change in behavior:
https://www.chessvariants.com/index/listcomments.php?itemid=DiagramDesigner&order=DESC&first=36719&last=36723

On this page, I copied out Pieces section to Notepad++, and used this regex:

find: (drawdiagram.php\?code[^&{"]*)\.
repl: $1$2$3{.}

This finds periods after drawdiagram.php?code and any number of characters that are not among &, {, ". The exclusions prevent searching beyond the ffen code from the drawdiagram script. The match always gets the furthest ., and so we replace from the rightmost side; repeating this (and the excluded {) eventually replaces everything we want.

This means I have to mash "replace all" until all the replacements are done, but that's fine.

There's a bigger issue with generated images, like the ZEBU (.ZRH) and BISON (.JZ). When copying from the webUI editor, the surrounding squiggly brackets got url-encoded, so that they were missed by the regex, and the leading . got caught and changed. I manually fixed these two.

I'll ponder ways to improve this process, but thought I'd describe it here so that (1) I'll remember, and (2) anybody (handier with regex?) can provide feedback.

Finally, the diagram containing the forward-only versions had suffered a newline in its url, which together with some added indentation for some reason, interpreted the additional whitespaces as requesting stones added to the board. I fixed that as well.

And on a possibly totally unrelated note: some of the math expressions are weird, seemingly including extraneous characters just before every exponent character?

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?

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.