Comments by benr
Happy 25th anniversary, Chess Variant Pages!
Thanks for following up. I checked with Firefox (v66), removing cookies and then logging in, and didn't have a problem. The cookie whose presence determines that message (I think) is cvpuser
, which ought to get populated when you first try to log in. Is that one of the five that got stored for you?
...and the overzealous use of caching seems to be the browser, not our site. I don't know what changed, or if there's an easy thing for us to do to override that browser behavior. (On some pages we've been appending dummy unique ids as part of the query in URLs, which fixes the caching but is not ideal.)
In the intervening time, we've had submissions from strong community members who do not have their real names displayed on these pages. I (and I think we?) still have a slight preference for real names, for the encyclopedic nature of the site, but there are many sites now where site-famous people are later referred to as "user xyz of site abc," so maybe it's fine.
Another thing that changed in the time since your submission: the Diagram Designer. The use of a period to denote a dot on the board (for movement diagrams) has been deprecated; you can replace them with a pound symbol (#), or a few other options.
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I've made a few grammatical and layout edits, and Reviewed the page. For now it is a Piece article, pending Fergus's review for the Piececlopedia. I listed Betza as the inventor.
When I click the button, it also displays the old graphics and the message that rules are not enforced; however, when I enter the URL directly or click on Move, it brings up the new rules-enforcing settings. Another weird cache effect?
@fergus, this page is just a copy of https://www.chessvariants.com/rules/chess-on-an-infinite-plane with different graphics. (Although now I see that that page has some issues with characters as well.)
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The most obvious difference with Cheshire Cat Chess is when n>1. But also the elimination of draw rules makes it interesting, IMO. An insufficient material endgame, for example, becomes a puzzle similar to Joust Chess.
I've added a tag square-removal to track similar games.
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I agree that this is really very far out on the chess variant spectrum. I don't think I'd say it's more a poker variant than a chess variant though. I tend to err on the side of inclusiveness; Greg?
Actually, I think it would be a better game with more poker elements; a matching pair/triple, or flush/straight (but only three cards) should confer some bonus in the chess phase?
And, if the game is to stay, the page needs a fair bit of formatting work.
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The page is no longer empty, but the images are external, and do not work. (The links do work, interestingly.)
I see you've also included some attempts at local image inclusion, but they point to nonexistant files here. I've edited the first one to point to the location I would expect your images to be hosted (@Fergus, is this documented somewhere for users?), but I don't find any files there either; have you uploaded any images yet (there's a link near the bottom of the page when you are logged in)?
I did not understand it from the text on this page, but reading the linked description of Bushi Shogi, I think I now understand it. I don't think the cannons actually play any role, except to denote the two sides. A sample game on this page would be helpful.
It would be very hard to call this a chess variant, or even a shogi variant, IMO.
I've added the checkmating potential note to this page.
I wanted to call out that the "vocabulary" section here seems to disagree with our current definition of adjacent in the glossary, when referring to hexagonal variants. I think such sections in the Piececlopedia should generally be replaced to a link to the glossary, but we should consider whether we like the glossary definition of "adjacent" for hexagonal boards.
@Fergus, sorry, I looked up the recent thread but went to the old glossary anyway. The newer one is more general and matches the use here, but I'd still suggest to remove the Vocabulary sections of the Piececlopedia in favor of links to the glossary.
@H.G., thanks, I'll add the board size comment later today. (I just noticed you already brought up this complication almost a year and a half ago!) Can the checkmating applet extend to accept a board size (as a URI query parameter)? Is 14x14 or 15x15 too large to generate the endgame table in an online setting?
While I don't get the author information block displayed on this page, I assume (based on the link on my own page and the itemID of this page) that the link is
https://www.chessvariants.com/index/managefiles.php?itemid=MSphantom
which gives me the error:
The directory
/membergraphics/MSphantom/
does not exist.
Trying to navigate directly to the folder also fails.
and if you'll allow the humble 8x8, you can test out that endgame:
https://www.chessvariants.com/membergraphics/MSinteractive-diagrams/EGT.html?betza=WAD&name=Champion&img=champion
(I really like this thing; thanks H.G.!)
I noticed that the Champion's Piececlopedia page has an incorrect diagram (due to the new marker code). I'll fix that and add a link to the 8x8 checkmating practice after work today.
I don't understand the phrase "Draws are possible; stalemates are not." But in the addendum, point 3 is pretty clear:
If you cannot make a move during your turn, you lose.
So the Vf1xf7 move H.G. brings up is actually a winning move.
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I get that the Templar is a knight plus captureless-ox, but the other pieces that move like a "Templar but not as an Ox" should instead just say they move like a knight or <whatever>; I think that would be substantially clearer.
The Giraffe's description wasn't clear to me, but the movement diagram mostly fixes that. But, is the Giraffe blocked by a piece diagonally adjacent?
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@KelvinFox, for a Piececlopedia article (and useful advice even for ordinary Piece articles), see
https://www.chessvariants.com/piececlopedia.dir/guidelines.html
You can use the Post Your Own Game scripts, using only the Introduction field, to have a more flexible header system. (When the fields other than Introduction are empty, the headers are suppressed, and you can include your own.) You can't select Piece or Piececlopedia, but we (the editors) can change that after. (But if you want to put it in the Piececlopedia, you'll need to ask Fergus whether he'd prefer/insist on a static html file instead of script submission.)