Ratings & Comments

I agree with you HG. The rule is clear and good. It would be nice if on computer play it would be possible to mark the Bishops as you suggest for woodware play.

I suppose that David uses the term 'early promotions' not so much to refer to promotions before the last rank is reached, but to promotion so early in the game that nothing has been captured yet. And I agree that this rule doesn't really make a more interesting game, but seems purely conceived for the convenience of playing it with woodware, without the need for extra pieces. (Which seems a bit strange, as it would still need two extra Pawns and pieces per player, presumably from a second orthodox set, which would leave plenty of spare pieces available for promotion.

On the other hand, one could argue that it is a nice tactical dilemma that when you are planning a promotion you should also take care something worthwhile is traded by the time you reach last rank. This happens so rarely, however, that it doesn't seem worth to complicate the rules for making it possible.

Note that although the orthodox game shown by David does have an early promotion, but not one where the promoted Pawn survives.

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.

@ David

Pawn promotions before reaching the last rank can look more or less aesthetic depending on which games a person has played. I've seen comments elsewhere by chess players that they wish the board edge was 'made use of' (as though by chess 'tradition') in Grand Chess, by having promotions only there. However, anyone who's played shogi will note that in that classic game, earlier promotions than on the board edge are allowed by tradition also (the tradition evidently being that the first three ranks of an opponent are where his pieces or pawns start from in the setup, as is the case for Grand Chess).

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've just finished a game of Symmetric Chess. At first I was seduced by this rule of Bishop's conversion, but finally I am not so convinced. My opponent was playing with White, so his two Bishops were on white squares. He moved c-Bishop first, then he lost it. So, only his g-Bishop remained on its initial square unmoved and was waiting for a conversion non-capturing move that never came.

I found rather confusing looking at this chessboard with this unique remaining Bishop standing on g1 and unable to move on the diagonals. An observer coming at this moment would not understand why the Bishop cannot move and capture a piece on f2 or h2.

So the rule is clear, but I found this a bit bizarre after all.

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'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.

Definitely something wrong there, and considering the 'modified' date probably of my doing. It seems the file was moved 'out of the way' by changing an o into an x. I don't recall doing this, but I was probably experimenting for how to hack new games directly into the Jocly library, to discover which files it actualy used for running by removing those and try what would break.

The curious thing is that in the Jocly install on my website the name is shako-chess-model.js. The date is exactly the same, though. (And just a few days before I implemented my first game, Team-Mate Chess.) I must have renamed it after the jocly/dist/ sub-tree was copied to CVP.

The problem is that the content of that file is also not what it is supposed to be. It is not uglified, and looks like the source file jocly/src/games/chessbase/shako-model.js. Normally the files jocly/dist/browser/games/chessbase/*-chess-model.js are a concatenation of the base-model.js, the variant-specific model file and perhaps some others, and then uglified. The uglification is probably not essential (the hack I used for implementing my games was to replace the uglified variant-specific part from such a file for a similar game by source code of my own game, but it needs to contain the base-model.js code to work.

Problem is that I cannot find the original uglified shako-chess-model.js file anywhere amongst my files. I tried to put back this file (on my own website) from a recently compiled Jocly from the back-porting project, but apparently the base-model.js file there is no longer sufficiently compatible with the old one for this to work. Unfortunately I forgot from where I clopied the Jocly version on my website, otherwise I could fetch a shako-chess-model.js file from there. Perhaps Zied still has a version on the Musketeer Chess website.

[Edit] I now managed to find a shako-chess-model.js file in the Downloads folder of one of my Windows systems. When I put that in the Jocly install on my website (and go through the cumbersome procedure of flushing the cached version), Shako works again there. The file is probably the same as that in the originalShako directory (where all files do have the same date). This directory does not exist in the Jocly install on my website, though. So I have no idea how it got created on CVP, which (at least for the jocly/dist/ part) was supposed to be a copy of that. It looks like someone copied all shako-* files on CVP to this directory, and then renamed the shako-chess-model.js. Anyway, I copied the shako-chess-model.js file now back to the chessbase folder on CVP as well. This should fix the problem if nothing else was changed.

Why this title A A Royal and His Pet, with 2 A? A typo?

Oh, thanks everyone for fixing the page up, thanks so much.

H.G. said ...

I think this page is also misrepresented in the index: it is mainly a rule description; that it also happens to contain a link to a Zillions file is coincidental.

Yes, you are right, I did this page ages ago and for some reason never did a proper game page, and then it got all these nice comments and I just left it like it is. Maybe sometime I could write a proper game page and add if you want to comment on the game to do it on the 'download the game' page, I dunno lol.

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?

Shako sounds well!