I have begun migrating our early link pages to the database. This provides the following advantages:

• It makes broken links easier to fix.
• It makes link pages easier to edit.
• It gives link pages a more uniform URL.
• It gives me the opportunity to find broken links and fix them, or to delete link pages that are no longer useful.
• Having all links in the database will make it easier to write and deploy a site-wide link checker.

As I migrate old link pages to the database, I am adding the old url and the new itemid to a table called RelocatedPages. This table will be used by the 404 script to point visitors toward the new link pages. It may also be used for any other HTML pages we eventually migrate to the database. But for now, I'm making link pages the first priority.

It can be deleted then?

I added links to the mentioned games, and I added the name of the game that is not simply named for its inventor. For those who might be familiar with Capablanca's Chess but not with Capablanca Random Chess, it may be worth mentioning that castling works as it does in Fisher Random Chess, not as it does in Capablanca's Chess. As those without any familiarity with Capablanca's Chess may expect, castling works by moving the King two spaces toward the Rook, not three spaces, which is the rule in Capablanca's Chess.

It's name is that: "Apothecary Chess Tournament 1st Edition" . But I do not know it's ID!

I believe that's also its id, though you have to enter plus signs for the spaces. I corrected the link placed in the Related Pages menu. It was missing the play directory, because it was originally on the play subdomain. If you check the "This Tournament" link in the menu, it should now list the games in the tournament.

Do we have histories on tag descriptions to restore?

They have begun showing up on archive.org, but this particular tag didn't have a description.

I expect this was from the same script glitch or user error as the parent tag.

It appears to be the same user. I have no idea what this tag is for. Do you?

Does anyone get alerted to comments on tag pages?

No, but if you check the latest comments regularly, you will see them.

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

I'm guessing it's a user error. You can go correct it.

I made a few modifications and published this.

I made a few small changes and published this. I corrected the spelling of default, mentioned that the ChessCraft app is for Android, and used an H3 heading for the smaller variant.

It looks fine. I've now published it.

With so many pieces, the game could be easier to learn if you used piece names that were already in common usage rather than making up a bunch of new ones.

I cannot find the matches in the Apothecary Chess Tournament 1st Edition anymore.

What is the tournament id?

I see, well it's already in PNG format so no issue there

So it is. That probably happened when you added file and rank markings to it. I reduced the filesize from 231116 bytes to 65655 bytes by changing it from a true color image to a 32 color image.

This page might benefit from including the full rules, but I'll accept it as is, since the remaining rules can be found in Orda Chess, which it links to.

Since I have now made the headings more distinct from each other, I quickly noticed that you were using H2 headings where you should be using H3 headings, and I moved all headings down one level. I also added a Pychess tag.

This looks like an interesting game, and the page is well-written and presented. I moved the headings down one level, because the script handles the H1 and H2 headings, and author-entered headings should normally begin with H3.

The Pychess link did not work. I left it up in case this is temporary. If Pychess is no longer around, I hope someone will let me know.

While not mentioned so much explicitly, it seems that Kingdom Pawns do get double moves, and Dynasty Pawns may not capture them en passant, though they may still capture them sideways.

I added this game to the Unequal Armies category, and I removed it from the Usual Equipment categories, since it cannot be played with nothing but the usual equipment.

I replaced the original diagram with the interactive diagram H. G. Muller made.

This page is missing the Game Courier preset it is supposed to have on it. I changed the H1 tag to a P tag for the body text, and I edited the English for some of the text. But since the Game Courier preset is not here yet, and I am unfamiliar with the game and don't know French, I did not complete the job.

I removed the extra links to the website inserted into the text, because link pages automatically include the link, and if the link is ever broken, all we should have to fix is the one link the link page is supposed to have. I changed the link to Don Green's website to a link to his profile on our site, and I added a link to our page on his game. That page includes a link to a link page for his website.

The dark center squares appear to be the same color as the border, which makes it look like these squares have been removed from the board. Yet I saw no mention of this. If the board has no squares missing, it would be less confusing if you used a different color for the dark center squares than you do for the border.

I changed H2 tags to H3 tags, because H2 tags are automatically used for each major section, and headings entered by the author should normally begin with H3. I didn't change anything else. I didn't read all the way through, because it's long, and Adam pays enough attention to detail that I don't have to comb through every detail myself.

Additionally, I cannot find any mention of Kronschild Publishing that is not associated with this book. As far as I can tell, this is the only book ever published by Kronschild Publishing. It was located in Lewisville, AR, which is also where JWB is said to have lived. The book has no ISBN, and all indications are that it was self-published.

Furthermore, it looks like John William Brown was old and has died. In his Preface, he mentions a trip to the Computer Science Department of Rutgers University in 1975. He was presumably an adult at the time, which would make him 64 or older. I don't recognize any name in his Acknowledgements except Hans Bodlaender. A few that I looked up gave me obituaries of old people. He mentions one in more detail, an old friend named Lewis Chessner who was a minister with a degree in physics. I found the obituary of a Rev. Lewis Chessner from Arkansas, and it did mention that he had a degree in physics. This old friend of Brown's was born in 1933. The only John William Brown I can find who lived in Lewisville is listed as 77. This person was related to Edith Brown, which is the name of "the foremost contributor" mentioned in the Acknowledgements. Finally, when I did a search for "Edith Brown Lewisville", the top result was an obituary for Johnny William Brown. Edith was his mother, and he was born in 1944. I expect this is him, and he is no longer with us.

The Classified Encyclopedia has an entry for Quantum Chess, but it's a different game (seemingly the one described in Variant Chess 17);

Yes, it's a different game. It is a proprietary game by Quantum Development Corp from 1993.

did this game appear in the original Encyclopedia and get replaced/removed in the new one?

The original Encyclopedia did have an entry for "QUANTUM C", but it described a different game, one invented by Douglas A. Engel in 1968 and played on a 6x8 board.

However, the game described on this page is the game described in Variant Chess 25, and that issue credits it to the author of this page.

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

I have emailed John William Brown at the email address we have on record for him and at the address listed in the book. Let's see if I get a response.

1. This could be better written.
2. You're using the Knight image for the Cavalier. The Abstract set has a separate Cavalier image.
3. You're using the Berolina Pawn image for the Man. The Abstract set does have images for the Man piece, though it's called Centurion in that set.
4. From the descriptions, your Unicorn and Varan seem to be different than the pieces whose images you have used for them. It is hard to follow the descriptions to understand how these pieces move.
5. Your piece descriptions mention values, but these seem to have no bearing on the rules of the game. If what you mean are the exchange values of the pieces, these cannot actually be known without some degree of analysis. Guessing at piece values is usually not helpful. So, I expect it is best to leave out any mention of piece values.
6. The page would be easier to follow if you included an image of each piece with its description and used an H3 heading before each piece description.
7. A major piece is any piece that can checkmate a King on an empty board with assistance only from one's own King. By this definition, the Rook and Man both count as major pieces.

I have published this, but I would recommend replacing your diagram with a GIF or PNG image that uses fewer colors, has a smaller file size, and is cropped on the sides. I removed the CSS code that set the height and width of the image, since these values have to adapt to the space available, and with these values set, it was not keeping its original aspect ratio.

The URL included only the domain and was not in the form of a complete URL. After I fixed that, it worked.

According to the comments preceding the castle subroutine, you need to flag the spaces of pieces that may legally castle. The subroutine does not care what the pieces are. If you flag both the rook and the cannon, it will, once other conditions pertain, initially allow castling with the rook, but if the rook moves out of the way, it will allow castling with the cannon.

I have updated this page with more factual information.

I have now published this page.

I made a new logo for the home page, and I updated the smaller logo to use some of the same fonts. The word "CHESS" is in Noto Serif, the word "vArIanT" (or "VArIaNT") in Spin Cycle 3D OT, and the other words in Noto Sans. In the smaller logo, I left those words in the original font, which I think is one of the Segoe UI fonts. The Elephant and Unicorn are Musketeer Chess pieces I took a photo of together to keep them at the same scale. The Elephant is a historical piece that goes back to Chaturanga and is found in various Asian regional variants, while the Unicorn is a fairy chess piece that looks an awful lot like a certain Chess piece. Since the black Elephant appeared too dark, I tried a color gradient on the image of the two pieces and liked the result. The varying colors looked psychedelic and seemed appropriate for a site about variants. Above the word "CHESS" are the pieces of Chess. Below the word "vArIanT" are a selection of Chess variant pieces in different styles.

I want to thank those who gave feedback. I was trying to solve specific problems, and feedback helped me learn that solutions I found acceptable were not acceptable to others, which prompted me to find other solutions that worked better.

I would presume that the method for setting up the position is supposed to be random, but this is not mentioned in your description of that procedure. It's also not clear what the things you have in parentheses, like 5x and 4x, are supposed to mean.

I can't figure it why but I have a green background and a blue highlight.

At some point, I started using highlight color instead. I included this in the form players could use to customize the appearance of a game, but I neglected to add it to the Edit form used by game designers. I have now added it in.

I added links to the two games you mention. So that the reader doesn't have to consult another page to know the full rules of your game, it would help to include the rules from Capablanca Random Chess for randomizing the setup.

I also should mention that I don't really like the images I currently have assigned to the archbishop and chancellor with the Diagram Designer, but I could not figure out how to submit my own piece design there.

I see you're using a Cannon image for the Chancellor and a Marshall (or Chancellor) image for the Missle. You may submit images for a set to an editor. The new images should be designed to fit in with the style of the set. I would recommend uploading your new images and letting an editor know in the comments. Many other sets portray the Chancellor and Archbishop as a combination of two pieces, which makes them instantly recognizable.

I see you were styling your text. In particular, you put BIG tags around your text, and you used CSS to put a border around each piece description. In particular, I am getting a scrollbar at the bottom of the page, which I think is caused by your CSS. I will refer you to Preferred HTML form of contributions.

I changed some H2 tags to H3 tags, and I moved one section from Rules to Notes. The script for displaying member-submitted content normally adds the appropriate H1 and H2 tags, and tags entered by the author should begin with H3.

This page has a broken image link.

I tidied up this page, replacing non-Unicode characters, and replacing the low effort ASCII diagram with one generated by Game Courier. It's still an ASCII diagram, because I wasn't sure what images to use for some of the pieces.

I have adjusted the em values for the headings so that specific integer pixel values will be used when the body font is 16px. These are 36px for H1, 32 for H2, 29 for H3, 26 for H4, 21 for H5, and 18 for H6. Instead of making the differences the same between each pair of neighboring headings, I used smaller differences where the style changed more, and I put a distance of .5em (8px) between distant headings using the same style.

The off-site image on this page looks like it was made with Game Courier or the Diagram Designer, and it could easily be replaced with a query string link provided by the Diagram Designer.

I adjusted the margins of the headings to be the same, and I put more space above a heading than below it so that each heading is closer to the text it is a heading for. But I also avoided making it look crowded by putting a heading too close to the text following it.

"Syntax Error on line 200

The last expression is 10f. In for or foreach, it must evaluate to an array."

This has been fixed.

I fixed the problem and went back to using the same code for array as I do for values. The problem was that for an array with one element, it was returning the value of that element instead of a one-member array.

You were correct in identifying the problem. The range functions for the Pawns did not take into account the value of fps. However, replacing 2 with fps would not allow for first Pawn moves that are shorter than the maximum possible distance. For example, if fps were set to 3, this would include 3-space moves, but it would not include 2-space moves. This is what I ended up with:

def White_Pawn-Range mergeall where #ori -1 1 where #ori 1 1 filter lambda (onboard #1) aggregate lambda (where #ori 0 #0) range 1 var fps =ori;
def Black_Pawn-Range mergeall where #ori -1 -1 where #ori 1 -1 filter lambda (onboard #1) aggregate lambda (where #ori 0 neg #0) range 1 var fps =ori;

These use aggregate to create an array of spaces a Pawn may advance forward to, and they use filter to weed out non-spaces that are out-of-range. They use a named parameter in order to use its value in the lambda function used by aggregate.

I have since modified the functions above to use the filter on all results:

def White_Pawn-Range filter lambda (onboard #1) mergeall where #ori -1 1 where #ori 1 1 aggregate lambda (where #ori 0 #0) range 1 var fps =ori;
def Black_Pawn-Range filter lambda (onboard #1) mergeall where #ori -1 -1 where #ori 1 -1 aggregate lambda (where #ori 0 neg #0) range 1 var fps =ori;

Finally, I replaced aggregate with an expanded version of the values operator. With a lambda function and an array, it will work just like filter except that it returns a sequential array of each value calculated by the lambda function. Unlike aggregate, it will include values of zero, because it does no filtering on the results it calculates. As it did before, it will return the values of an array if that is what's passed to it. If it does not get a lambda function or an array, it will return the rest of the arguments following it as a single array.

def White_Pawn-Range filter lambda (onboard #1) mergeall where #ori -1 1 where #ori 1 1 every lambda (where #ori 0 #1) range 1 var fps =ori;
def Black_Pawn-Range filter lambda (onboard #1) mergeall where #ori -1 -1 where #ori 1 -1 every lambda (where #ori 0 neg #1) range 1 var fps =ori;

@Fergus It seems that the infinite loop was caused by the following code:

setelem op .JW + elem .JW op 1; setelem op .jw + elem .jw op 1;

That's two lines of code. In the first line, you are trying to increment #op[".JW"] by one, and in the second, you are trying to increment #op[".jw"] by one.

.jw is the wazir camel piece and I had wanted to to increase the number of them in reserve. Probably the dot is causing trouble. Do you agree?

Yes, it looks like it is causing trouble. In a test I ran, it incremented #op["JW"] and #op["jw"] by one instead of the elements you named. This is probably because the period is now used as a separator between array and element names, and the setelem command now just concatenates the array and element names by putting a period between them, and uses this concatenated name with the function for setting a user variable.

What I would recommend is to follow the instructions I have previously given for replacing piece labels without using aliases, which is in the comments for the Game Courier Developer's Guide. This would give you nice clean piece labels that you can use in your code without running into problems like this.

I've used the fairychess include file to make a preset, and everything seems to work fine, including the Rhino, but pawns can't promote. They can't move to the last rank at all. As far as I can tell, I've set everything right. Can you please take a look?

You have set bprom and wprom as constants instead of as variables. Consequently, it has nothing to promote the Pawn to on the last rank, and it is forbidding movement to the last rank without something the Pawn may promote to.

I have a preset for one of my new games. Once after saving the preset I could not access it anymore as I get a totally white window. I use microsoft edge. What happens?

My best guess is that your code contains an infinite loop. You can figure things out more precisely by going here:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Grand+Apothecary+Chess+3&settings=Default&submit=Edit

1. Save each block of code to a text file on your computer.
2. Delete each full block of code in turn until you determine which block of code is causing this to happen.
3. Restore your code from your backup.
4. Working with the block of code that is buggy, delete or comment out large portions of it to determine where the problem lies. Make sure that each portion you delete or comment out can be safely removed without breaking up control structures.
5. Once you isolate the problem to a large section, delete or comment out smaller parts of that section until you find the line that is causing your problem.
6. Examine that line to figure out what the problem is, fix it, and see if it fixes your problem.

Fergus, do you think you could take a stab at programming the Rhino in Game Courier? I'd like to get this game added, but the Rhino is problematic.

Okay, I wrote some new functions for it and got it working. It's in the fairychess include file under the name Rhino.

I just turned on the group write bit for the file. Try it again.

Nothing has been set up to let you delete settings files. So, I did it for you.

I wonder if there is an option in Game Courier somewhere to have pieces rotate 180 degrees when the board is flipped?

There is no option for rotating piece images.

This is not the $flip variable in the set file, as that swaps the values for lowercase and uppercase keys when the board is flipped

That is not quite what it does. What is actually does is use the piece images in the $flipped array instead of those in the $pieces array. In case any piece labels have not been assigned to piece images in the $flipped array, it completes the $flipped array with this code:

if ($flip == true) {
    foreach ($pieces as $key => $val) {
        if (empty($flipped[$key]))
            $flipped[$key] = $pieces[flipcase($key)];
    }
}

This is useful for Shogi variants, in which the pieces on one side are usually 180° rotated images of the pieces on the other side. Note that some Shogi sets assign specific images to k and K for $flipped, because each side uses a different Kanji character for the piece, and they use the default values for the rest. Here's an example of such code:

$flipped = array (
    "K" => "WKing.gif", "k" => "flip/BKing.gif"
);

But where can I find these new filenames if I am not a psychic?

Go to the directory for this page. Just chop off the file name.

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.

Has anyone made link pages for these sites?

I am attempting to verify my email for my account, but it seems that whenever I click on the link in the email, it just sends me to a change email form that doesn't verify the email. How can I fix this?

Your profile says your email is verified.

It seems that on custom boards, pieces are now displayed farther down and to the right than they are supposed to.

This has now been fixed. Now that it's using relative URLs for pieces, I had to change how the path to the image file is calculated.

Why are there no pieces displayed? Even when I try customizing the preset.

I recently changed all sets to use relative URLs for the pieces. While the URLs were correct, the pieces all had a height and width of 0. This is because you were rescaling a board rendered as a table, and it needed to read information about each image file to do this properly, but it no longer had the correct path to the image to do this. I corrected this, and now the pieces will show up when you rescale your preset.

Why are there no pieces displayed? Even when I try customizing the preset.

Can you provide more information about what you are doing? All I can tell you right now is that there is no system-wide problem.

There must have been something temporarily wrong on the server, such that the server-side script could not find the Snake image file to compose the entire image.

Yes, I made all $dir values relative today, and I had to fix the diagram designer before it would work properly with relative URLs.

But I will have to test having a + in the piece label ... I suspect that might cause a problem.

It shouldn't. Shogi uses the + sign in piece labels, and the Alfaerie:Many set uses all kinds of punctuation.

Game Courier preset, ... Game Courier setting file, multiple presets, indexed link page, so complicated for someone like me to understand what I'm doing.

I have updated the FAQ to help clarify this.

I modified the sets files to use relative URLs for the value of $dir. I modified some other code to work with relative URLs, and I added code that exits the script with an error if you use a value of $dir that does not begin with a forward slash. So, from now own, $dir should be set only to a relative URL to a directory on this site.

Using relative URLs has a few advantages:

• Piece URLs will be shorter, using less bandwidth.
• Insecure http image URLs will no longer be used, since relative URLs will default to secure https URLs.
• No one will be able to use piece images that are located on another website.

In a related matter, $dir is now an accessible system variable in GAME Code. You may write to it with setsystem or get its value. This is useful for using GAME Code to create and use custom piece sets that are not defined in a PHP file. More details can be found here.

I wanted to create a new Game Courier preset to play this Maasai Chess. Then, I follow the link to create a new GC preset. But at the end, the process gives a similar template than for a normal page entry. This is confusing.

I expect you followed the link to create a link page to a Game Courier preset. This is what you should do after you have already created your preset.

So, I started from an existing GC preset of my own, I modified it, I renamed it "Maasai Chess", I saved it and I spent my evening working on it. This morning, I wanted to come back on it and continue ... but I can't find it. Where is it?

What you created is a Game Courier settings file. A settings file may be used as the basis for multiple presets with different appearances, or it may be used as a single preset without modification. After you have made your presets, the next step would be to create an indexed link page to them. To find your settings file, look in the menu under your name for "Your Game Courier Settings Files".