Comments by benr

Is this website no longer being updated?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You can also see the listing of submitted-but-unpublished pages here; viewing the pages listed there requires being logged in.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.