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Index page of The Chess Variant Pages. Our main index page.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]A link to the Graphics directory http://www.chessvariants.com/graphics.dir/index.html
would be helpful. It's hard to find it, otherwise. Thanks.
Could I suggest a link to past, present, (and future) tournaments either on the index page or the side bar? Thanks.
I wanted to deep-link to the Zillions index of the CV Pages from my own chess variant web site but the complete web address, intentionally spelled-out for the benefit of interested parties, would have been preposterously long- covering 2 lines! A general link to your main web site is all I can give until someone devises a more practical, concise and logical, system of classification. The system you previously had was just fine in this regard. For your amusement ... http://www.chessvariants.com/index/mainquery.php? type=Zillions&orderby=LinkText&displayauthor=1&displayinventor=1&usethisheading=Zillions
David Howe wrote on Thu, Sep 19, 2002 05:39 PM UTC:Thanks Derek, it's nice to know my work is appreciated.
it's a mystery to me why you can't link to a page just because its url is long.
'Too long to remember and/or transcribe without a likelihood of error' was my point which is corollary to Tony Quintanilla's point about certain topics being hard to find. Please don't be discouraged by the remarks of one fastidious individual (i.e., myself). The described, minor problems can surely be overcome. The CV Pages have been markedly improved thru the new indexing system you adopted and much hard work on your part (and others). Thank you!
Providing Google searches within the CVP should be very useful. I did a quick search for 'chess' in the CVP and got a very interesting list. I am not sure if it was reflective of the number of links to those pages, but it turned up a number of interesting variants, particularly among the first 20 or so.
Hello,
The 'Chesmayne Chess Dictionary' will be back on-line in 2004.
It
is presently being re-edited.
Yours sincerely,
Raymond Reid [Chesmayne].Fine Site. ------------ Barboss.
visit www.freechess.org to play free bughouse chess and other chess variants, and as barboss said this is a fine site.
quantumplation wrote on Tue, May 4, 2004 06:55 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★Just a suggestion. Could you add a 'Regional Variants' category to your sortings? This would include Chess variants that originated in specific regions of the world. Xiang Qi, Shatar, Shogi, Etc, would be in this section. Things like mexican chess wouldn't count, which are named as though they are a regional variant, but are infact not related to the region much at all. Anyway, just an idea =) keep up the good work, everyone!
Alexander E. Stevens wrote on Tue, May 11, 2004 01:14 AM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★Oh wait, I suppose that's pretty much covered by historic variants. Just wasn't the first place i thought of looking for specifically international variants. sorry =)
Historical Variants covers regional variants only partially. Oriental Variants should cover the rest.
I've been visiting this site for quite a while and I find the random page feature particularly nice. However, would it be possible to add a feature where can call up say, 10 random pages? It's just that this would be quicker if the random page is something I've already seen, at the moment I have to cycle between 'What's New' and 'What's New (All Languages).
Great site. Almost everything that I need to know. Thanks ken
<P align=center><IMG height=288 src='http://groups.msn.com/isapi/fetch.dll?action=MyPhotos_GetPubPhoto&PhotoID=nHAAAAJ4HO08FooKEpcgDdWMW76*gcgUTT3I8nb9xf5*lncq!em!AiADM8QhsSOwy' width=182 align=left></P>
<DIV align=center><FONT face='Garamond, Times, Serif' color=#000099></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV align=center><FONT face='Garamond, Times, Serif' color=#000099 size=4>'Hello Everyone, just wanted to let all creators and editors of The Chess Variant site know you're doing a fantastic job! I admin the Chess Variant Club at <A href='http://groups.msn.com/chessvariantclub'>http://groups.msn.com/chessvariantclub</A> and we are currently organizing an international campaign to help people start variant club chapters in their own area. So if you're interested in getting one started, we will help you promote it and give you some tips on what you'll need. The growing interest of chess variants will influence people to want to meet and play in person more often and we're focusing on helping them do it. And thank you chessvariants.org for carrying the banner! If you would like to contact me, my email is [email protected]. Happy gaming!'</FONT></DIV>
David Howe, our chief editor who manages the overall workings of this site, has added a nice new feature. This is a link to all the Game Courier logs for a particular game on its game page. This link (if any logs exist) can be found at the bottom of each game's description page. Take a look! Thanks, David!
Greg Strong wrote on Thu, Nov 11, 2004 04:10 PM UTC:Excellent ★★★★★Yes! This feature is very nice! Is there any maximum age of those which will saved, or will you keep them so long as disk space permits?
Actually, this was the joint work of David Howe and Fergus Duniho. I wrote most of the code and gave David some blanks to fill in. It is a link to the Logs page for showing every publicly viewable log that has been played for a specific game. As you can tell by looking at the Age field when you go to the logs page, there is no age limit on the logs shown.
Greg Strong wrote on Thu, Nov 11, 2004 10:19 PM UTC:<p>Fergus Duniho says:
<blockquote>As you can tell by looking at the Age field when you go to the logs page, there is no age limit on the logs shown. </blockquote></p>
<p>Just because the age field has an option labled 'anytime' doesn't mean that you intend to save them forever. It was a perfectly reasonable question.</p>
I misunderstood your question. I don't know about forever, but I may save them until the end of the world, which some say is about eight years. I don't delete logs on the basis of age, but I do leave the option for the players of a game to delete its log, and I also retain the ability to delete any log, though I avoid making much use of it. Generally, my intention is to keep the logs for the sake of building up a huge library of games people have played of different Chess variants. I don't think the logs will make much of a dent in our diskspace, and by the time they do grow very large, webspace will probably be sold in the terabytes.
I inadvertently left out Fergus' Game Courier programming in my original comment about the new game logs feature. Thanks, Fergus.
Being able to view logs of all past and ongoing matches of particular games via the new links is a nice touch. Good going, David and Fergus, it's a very desirable feature.
This new feature did not involve any programming of Game Courier. I added a new feature to the logs page, and I wrote some PHP code that David translated into Perl. I have since used the PHP code to add the same feature to preset pages.
Greg Strong wrote on Fri, Nov 12, 2004 06:06 PM UTC:Sweet! Thanks again; this is very useful for when I add new games to ChessV to be able to see logs of actual games for purposes of testing and creating opening books. Hopefully as the popularity of chess variants, this site, and the Game Courier grows, the number of game logs for the popular games will grow into the hundreds!
Congratulations to CVP upon completing ten yrs. Carrying on Sam Trenholme's tradition, CVP's first post was Jetan probably 15.1.95, this week. CVP's first 5 yrs. tilted towards serious alterations of standard western Chess: Fischer Random, review of ancestral mainstays Chaturanga and Shatranj etc. However, countervailing trend, oblivious to the idea of perfectibility, was already apparent. For close-to-FIDE forms, 8x10 became the favourite board size. Piece mixes were often unchanged from 400-yr-old Carrera's, yet never was there discussion of Marshall's(Chancellor's) being inherently flawed piece, detracting from both R&N. Another missed opportunity was when Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997, but to this day orthodox world is also house divided about implications of computer dominance. The second 5 yrs. saw Ralph Betza defying the usual bell-shaped design trajectory in vanishing right upon completion of his 2-3 most prolific yrs. Since 2000 CVP games more often add bizarre rules hardly intended to be played, and blend Shogi-derived and Xiangqi-based pieces with western types, and thankfully(!?) no end in sight. So far nothing by Sam Loyd and very little T.R.Dawson or Martin Gardner, probably because David Pritchard in ECV overlooks them too. Almost all CVP-recognized games predate 1995, as do thousands of other curiosities not within its scope. Excluding those, the best form devised within CVP's domain during the ten yrs. 1995-2004? I vote Switching Chess and Rococo, appropriately one from each of the two schools, standard heterodox and free-form.
For those of you that look at 'What's New' in English you may have missed that Antoine Fourrière has been creating very nice pages in French. If you would like to see 'What's New' in all languages, look at this URL: http://www.chessvariants.org/index/whatsnewalllang.php
A newcomer would know nothing about the existence of Game Courier and find no listing at all on this main index page. So, shouldn't it be updated to include it?
you have to click on 'play' at the top of the page, but i agree, it doesn't stand out at all
Hi,
I just want to comment on such an informative Chess site....I have already referred several club players here.
Keep up the good work. Would like to see more active postings too!
Roger
www.secretsofchess.com
Bad Link: The 'Subject Index' link for 'Pieces' actually leads to the one for 'Puzzles'
Why is it taking so long to approve the member-submitted items?
A very nice webpage there! Best wishes, International Master Jovan Petronic FIDE Senior Trainer Chairman, FIDE Computer & Internet Chess Committee ASEAN Chess Academy Consultant FIDE Trainers' Committee member Kavala Chess Club Technical Advisor Federal Trainer, Greece Chess Federation Web: http://www.jovanpetronic.com Chess Software Reviews: http://www.jovanpetronic.com/chessreviews.htm
if you like please add http://www.madeinfirenze.it/chess_sets_e.htm to your links page thanks luca
Pages that link to other sites created using PHP script, such as many pages linking to the Zillions-of-Games site, are not functional at this time. We are aware of this problem. Thank you for your patience until it is resolved.
On some pages, such as the Xorix Shogi page, there are problems with entering HTML code and getting it back wrong when trying to edit it. If I give an example here, this page will also get messed up, so I won't. You can use the htmlspecialchars PHP function anywhere where a TEXTAREA tag is returned, to make sure it doesn't replace entities incorrectly and mess up when entering a ending textarea tag.
The new markers for variants based on Xiang Qi and Shogi are a great idea, they reflect a growing trend in inspiration. However, there are some notable omissions from those marked for Xiang Qi. This marker should be added to Fergus Duniho's Eurasian Chess, my own Anglis Qi (which is even in the Xiang Qi variants directory!), and my offshoots thereof, as all these have a River inspired by Xiang Qi.
David Howe wrote on Tue, Mar 21, 2006 02:20 PM UTC:Thanks Charles, I will update those pages. I am sure there are probably more that I missed, but I think I got the majority of them.
I want to suggest that an extra rating be added. In between 'Poor' and 'Good' the rating of 'Average.' There are cases when I think a variant is 'Average' but it would be too harsh for me to say 'Poor' too caring to say 'Good.'
Very good idea! I think a 1-10 scale would be even better.
I agree that the ratings system could use more options. In my view it should be possible to give a neutral rating, as Jeremy Good suggests, and to give a negative rating that is not the worst possible rating. I would like to see something like Awful, Bad, Neutral, Good, Excellent (with numerical values of -2, -1, 0, +1, +2) or perhaps even Awful, Bad, Poor, Neutral, Fair, Good, Excellent (-3, ..., +3).
Thinking about this gave me the giggles: -6 Beneath Contempt -5 Contemptible -4 Loathsome -3 Hideous -2 Miserable -1 Awful 0 Bad 1 Neutral / Average 2 Fair 3 Good 4 Excellent 5 Awesome 6 Incomparably Fine If one wanted to have additional layers, we could initiate additional categories, such as for 'originality.' A lot of games are original but have bad gameplay or unoriginal but with good gameplay (I am reminded of Ben Good's essay here about Omega Chess). Still other categories for 'fun-ness,' presentation, appearance. Categories could be optionally listed according to ratings and categories with overall negative ratings should perhaps be shelved into different sections of chess variants after each receives a fair number of votes from the community of users (as opposed to just members). There is one thing that disturbs me most of all about how people rate games and I fear that there is sometimes a tendency to judge games without playing them, trying them out. Sometimes, it is not necessary to playtest a game, but I think too often a game is judged too much by certain superficial aspects that have little to do with worth of gameplay (as with books by their covers.) If one has a separate category strictly for rating 'gameplay' (as opposed to other aspects), it could be a category that could only be filled out after actually playing the game. If nobody is willing to play a game, that would usually imply something about the nature of the game. I suggest that as long as a game maintains a positive gameplay rating, it not be shelved to the negative ratings section. Because a game can fail every other mechanism or gradation of analysis, but if people enjoy playing it, that's probably a pretty good test, in my opinion. 'Confusing presentation, ugly appearance, highly unoriginal concept, but amusing gameplay.'
I meant members as opposed to users, but probably there shouldn't be any restrictions on how a rating gets generated. I just meant mechanisms so that the value of a game isn't artificially inflated or deflated... By 'shelve' I just want to reinforce that I don't mean, be made unavailable, but just put in a separate section, and just as an optional way of listing according to rating.
i think the rating system in place is just fine, what is the point of 'neutral', what is that, it isn't even a rating, and isn't 'none' pretty much the same. i don't think it should be taken too seriously, if it is to be, non-members shouldn't be allowed to rate, and they are, which is fine by me too btw. to rate a game, as suggested a couple of comments down, as '-6 Beneath Contempt' and '-5 Contemptible' and '-4 Loathsome' and '-3 Hideous' and '-2 Miserable' etc etc is really bad taste, and i hope this site does not fall to this level. there are competitions to judge the best games anyway, or the games people nominate at least. who wants to rate a game 'beneath contempt' anyway lol
Like Christine, I think that Miserable and the stuff below is useless. What is the difference between a 'Hideous' and 'Loathsome' item? Is the 'Hideous' one better? I think both 'Hideous' and 'Loathsome' (and all those low rating) means that the item is has no value. If you think a submission is 'Loathsome', you should say what the problem is and so increase the chance that the next submission of the same inventor is not 'Loathsome'. Not add a negative atmoshpere by crying 'Loathsome!!'. About specifications like Playability: Neutral, Graphics: Good, etc. I think it is good enough if those specifications are said in the comment text. At least if I can say something between 'Good' and 'Poor', it should be fine. I think that ratings are less important than the comment text.
A link to SMIRF, developed by Reinhard Scharnagl, should be included under 'computer resources: programs that play chess variants'. SMIRF (English description) http://www.chessbox.de/Compu/schachsmirf_e.html
Thank you both for mentioning SMIRF here! It has become a free donationware playing some 8x8 and 10x8 variants, being supersets to traditional chess. But SMIRF still is in development. Reports on 'bad' experiences are welcomed if sent back directly to the author.
Hello,
Chesmayne Chess Dictionary link below...
http://homepage.eircom.net/~reidr1/index.html
Yours sincerely,
Raymond Reid [Dublin, Ireland].
PS: a link to the Variants web page has been included on the main index
page - enjoy! Yours is one of the best chess sites on the web!the user submitted work thing is great but however i have an idea in which you could enter a game idea and then other users could review it and make suggestions, but not changes this would make the site quicker maybe you could have an idea where someone enters a game idea and others enter more ideas for that game so it would multiple authors and everyone who was a contributor could help with the game.
David Howe wrote on Tue, Apr 10, 2007 09:18 PM UTC:I have created a Chess Variants Wiki, as a test to see if it would make sense to have a 'sister' site that would be more collaborative in nature. Any one interested should go to: http://chessvariants.wikidot.com/ This will be a learning process for me, as I am not familiar with administrating or building Wikis. My impression is that the Wiki community itself does most of the work. Is that right? ;-)
Joe Joyce wrote on Thu, Apr 12, 2007 11:45 PM UTC:David, you have to authorize applicants to use your wiki. I signed up for the general site, but cannot post until you make me a site-specific member. I don't know anything about wikis, either, but played around with it a bit to get as far as I did. Interesting idea.
David Howe wrote on Fri, Apr 13, 2007 01:44 AM UTC:Thanks Joe. I hadn't realized I had to approve new members. I've set up the site so that a password can be used so that new members can avoid waiting for me to approve them. The password is cvp2007 The proposed chessvariants wiki is at: http://chessvariants.wikidot.com/ It is not intended to replace chessvariants.org, nor is it intended to replace the chess variants section of the wikipedia. 3 people have joined up so far, but couldn't do anything because I hadn't approved them.
I'm very disappointed. Kokusai Sannin Shogi is a great game. It's nice to see the ideal 3 player game. But no one is permitted to rate or comment on the game. It's a crime, I tell ya!
The links to Game Courier ('Play' and 'Play by email' are broken. They point to play.chessvariants.com (which doesn't exist), not play. chessvariants.org
Also, 'Commented items' gives the message 'Error performing query: Column 'IsDeleted' in where clause is ambiguous'
Chesmayne Chess Dictionary - LINK. http://homepage.eircom.net/~reidr1/index.html
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