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Apothecary Chess-Classic. Large board variant obtained through tinkering with known games.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]
H. G. Muller wrote on Thu, Oct 8, 2020 08:37 AM UTC in reply to Kevin Pacey from 03:07 AM:

Well, it is hard to say without knowing exactly how you clicked. I can elucidate some general aspects of the Diagram, though:

  • The Diagram does not enforce turn order. Hence you can always make as many moves in a row as you want. If the AI is switched on, however, it will always reply to every move with a move of the other player. This causes some alternation of turns, but would not preclude you from moving for the side that the AI just moved for.
  • A click on a piece that is not highlighted as a valid target for a piece that was clicked before, will select that former piece, instead of any previously selected one. So it is not possible to enter illegal captures. Clicking an empty square will always move the selected piece there, whether it is legal or not.
  • When a Pawn enters the promotion zone, and the piece table below the board is open, a message will appear (on red background) above the board requesting you to select a piece from the table to promote to. The table should then have highlighted (in light blue) all the piece types that are available.
  • If the table is closed, however, a pawn entering the zone will automatically promote to a default piece, (the piece mentioned first in the promoChoice parameter of the Diagram) whether this is available or not. This is perhaps something I should improve on, e.g. by automatically opening the table and then following the same procedure as above.

If I must hypothesize on what happened, I would think you had the table open, but missed the request to select a piece (perhaps because it was out of view). When nothing happened after you clicked f8 you got confused about whether the click had succeeded, and clicked it again. (Or perhaps your mouse button 'bounced', and accidentally produced a double click.) But this click, instead of a click in the table for selecting a promotion piece, aborted the promotion move, and instead selected the black Pawn. This added to the confusion, and you tried to redo the entry completely, by clicking your own Pawn again. But this Pawn was a valid target for the (now selected) black Pawn (which, unlike the white Pawn, was not waiting for a promotion choice to be made). So what you intended as a first click for your move, was in fact interpreted as a second click for a black move, which was then executed (Pf8xe7).