Comments by benr

If you want to have the images hosted here (if they are just on your computer, not on the web yet and so have no URL), send them to me and I'll put them into the folders for the respective games.  (The text editor doesn't support uploading of images, AFAIK)

I would prefer you upload the board image to this site (there's a link near the end of the article with a link to "upload images"; after uploading, you can replace the url of the imgur image with the one from this site.

You'll need to elaborate on some rules:
#3: is that in addition to the other (standard) pieces?  (Why can't they promote to star cat?)
#4: do you mean any number of capturing moves in succession (sort of like checkers)?  Can a cat promote mid-capture-chain?
#5: in FIDE chess one can resign at any time, so this isn't really a new rule.

I'm curious whether you tested a board with fewer than 12 ranks.  At first, I thought the full 12 ranks was too many with the inclusion of short-range cats, but maybe the multi-capture counters that?

This needn't be mentioned in the article, but I will point out that the star cats are the Half-Ducks from The Remarkable Rookies of CWDA (but with multicapture capability).

Kevin Pacey brought up this variant in comments elsewhere.  We actually do have three pages here on the subject; all three are Friedlander java applets playing variants of it.  Unlike ((almost?) all?) of Ed's applets, these three have not been given itemIDs (are not in the database).  This is an odd situation, and makes me think perhaps Kevin is right that someone earlier made the decision to not include them in the database(?).

I cannot reply to a subject thread, getting an error that the item id doesn't exist (they aren't items, so probably the commentonitem.php isn't the correct script to be using in the "Add Response" link).

The random page link always gives me the Rules of Chess.

I also like the logo including the unicorn the best so far.  I would suggest a bit more bright coloring there (though I admit I don't know where).  My reasons pretty much echo what Jeffrey and Greg said.  I agree that the last two are pretty and clever but too complicated.

"They capture by normal movement..."
is, I assume, meant to mean that they don't have a different capture and non-capture movement.  So they capture one forward-left or forward-right.

They have both been reviewed.  Edits were requested of you (in the comments) and have not yet been made.

I made the Tags table.  I think I was intending to have a separate table of (ItemID, tagID) for the actual tagging of pages.  I wanted to display a page for each tag, which would have tagParagraph as a long-ish descriptor, followed by a list of games tagged.  tagSentence was meant for a mouse-hover helptext, and/or the short description used in an index page of all tags.

I had invisioned a heirarchy of tags, which is what tagParent was for.  For example, a tag "drops" might have children "pocket" (for self-pocketing pieces), "turncoat" (for dropping captured opponent pieces), etc.

I'm not sure if the number of users giving a game the same tag is particularly useful on this site.  On the other hand, I was thinking of tags mostly describing the game, and I suppose you could have tags about player preferences, which would care a lot about number of responses.

Can you play an additional king to the board?  If so, how does check/mate work?  Do queened pawns count as suit-less queens for the poker hand?  [It seems you can't under-promote?]

The instructions video says the responses to a raised bet are "fold, call, see", but aren't the latter two the same in usual poker?  In the video after "see" the players' hands are revealed; does that mean "see" is actually ending the round?  Does the response "call" also take that player's turn?

It might make sense for giving checkmate to actually provide a benefit; maybe even a small one like "draw a card"?  Anyway, that's a suggestion with no playtesting on my part.

Lastly, your introductory video makes a case for this game being computer-resistant.  We've had such discussions on this site before, and I would be hesitant to say that this game can actually hold its own against computers, if any programmers got the mind to work on it.  [Poker pros were recently beaten by computer, and the hard part there is the uncertainty and bluffing.  Since chess has been CPU-winnable for a while, I would expect it wouldn't be hard to teach the poker-AI to win this game.]

Kathy, you can add an image in a comment; there's a button in the editor roughly in the middle of the first row of buttons.  It uses a URL, so the image has to be online somewhere already (we don't have a[n easy] way to upload photos for storage at this site for comments).  You can use any free image hosting site, or send me an email (click my user name) and I'll upload it somewhere.

The description for Wide Chess does show up when trying to "edit links" from its page; I don't know why it's not being served up by the search or comment-header scripts...

Ah, fixed it.  There was another "Primary Link" that was empty (and also capitalized the title as "Wide chess"), and the script was picking that one over the other Primary Link that was entered.

If no one else gets to it, I'll look over the pages later; my students have finals the next couple of days.

This idea has surfaced before.  I remember it from Prince, the Base and its relatives.  The more general idea that "a rook blocks lines (from king passage) in 2D" should generalize to "a rook(ish thing) should block planes (from king passage) in 3D" has come up more often, not always with the blocking criterion now being discussed.

How does ChessV determine colorboundedness?  Just by moving a piece around for a few moves?

Yes, it is different.  Actually, Ed's applet links back to Tony Paletta's modest proposals, where the game is called instead "Clerical Chess."

That description is entered when you first go to Post Your Game, in the "Short description" field.  Presently a user cannot update this field (editing the index information instead just allows you to enter "What's New" text).  Similarly we only (presently) give users options for posting Games, external Links, ZoG files, and GC presets through the form.

If you want to send me descriptions for your games, I can insert them using the editor forms.  If you want to post a page of a type other than those above, you can submit it as a Game and let us know that it should be changed to something else.

[It shouldn't be hard to change the scripts to allow users more flexibility.  While it is probably preferable to not have game descriptions change too often, I don't think it would be bad to allow users to change them.  The page Types, on the other hand, are a bit unclear, and I wouldn't advocate for full access for users.  Perhaps they should be cleaned up anyway, and have this done before any changes to the user experience.]

I think the Recognized list is about as long as it should be: I'd like it to serve as a short list of games that somebody new to variants and this site would start with.

The Classic are unlikely to be touched any time soon.  The Vintage and Famous could be updated over time, but it should be a slow process (in particular, see the criteria for Vintage).  The Popular and Acclaimed lists, to me, have been superceded by the Favorites list and Game Courier's most played list.  However, in the spirit of keeping the page up to date, I wouldn't mind (1) dropping these lists in favor of links to Favorites and GC-MostPlayed or (2) updating the list(s) with panel-chosen games; in either case, I would advocate for keeping a historical recording of what games are removed or added and when (removed games should be thought of perhaps as good games that have gone out of vogue).

If this gets updated: I don't think there needs to be any word count or similarly mechanical requirement for proposals.  The proposal just needs to convince whoever is making the decisions that a game should be added.

We were down the last few days.

I don't know much about Game Courier, so we'll have to wait for Fergus regarding anything about giving back time.

Yes, that's right.  That fact (and that kings cannot reach corners, and that K+R cannot force mate against k) is pointed out in Pritchard's Classified Encyclopedia.  Also mentioned there are some variants, which are available here under the Related menu as Friedlander's Java applets: Displaced Grid Chess, wherein the grids are moved one rank and one file resulting in the left- and right-most grids being only one wide and fixing the pawn problem; and Berolina Grid Chess, using Berolina pawns instead of ordinary ones.

(I'll fix the link description, which currently says grids are "4 by 4" squares.)

(I've moved this thread under the Favorites page.)

The vast majority of people favorite only a small handful of games; these are the "gold hearts" games for those users.  For more granularity, there's the rating system in the comments, though we've mostly dropped support for that as a recommendation system due to disuse. (edited; see Kevin's next comment)

The more complicated we make the process, the more there is to quibble about specifics of implementation.  I like the Favorites list (mostly) as it stands.  I would consider developing a more complicated system, but would want it to be separate from this page.

A bit of information: at present, here's a table of how many favorites people have:

The average number of favorites (among those with a positive number) is 7.2.

This has some interesting ideas.  I would strongly encourage you to add the information directly to this site; external links have a habit of disappearing.  Adding a writeup directly here would be ideal, but even just uploading the pdf onto this server would be helpful.  [I don't think our image upload script will allow a pdf, but I can do the upload manually if you want; of course, then you can't edit it without resending to me or another editor...]

When will you be adding the other 8 factions?

How much have you playtested these armies against each other? I guess it is harder to gauge balance here, with the hidden information...

While we do fairly frequently bring up the question of what exactly qualifies something as a "chess variant," we acknowledge that there are different definitions.  For this reason I think we try to be inclusive rather than exclusive in allowed items.  (At least, that is my justification, and I suspect that may have been the case historically as well.  Also, it is helpful that this is a website and not a book: if I were writing another Encyclopedia of CV's, I would be more inclined to be exclusive for space considerations.)

Specifically here, we have a game played with a chess board and chess pieces (well, pieces with chess movement plus arrow-firing), but the goal and some mechanics have been completely changed.  (Somewhere, I can't find it now, this group of games is described.  Joust is another example, and maybe even puzzles like the 8 Queens and similar things qualify.)

I've generally thought of Crossovers differently: they are specifically a blending of Chess with some other established game.  E.g., I wouldn't consider this game or Joust crossovers.  Cheskers is a crossover with checkers, and For the Crown is a crossover with deck-building games.

Cheskers actually does seem to meet the royalty condition, though in a different way than standard chess (starting with more than one, and allowing the addition of new ones).