Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

For the sake of performance, the Logs page is now handled by querying a database instead of by reading and checking every log individually. This introduces the possibility that there will now be some discrepancies between what is in the logs and what the database has recorded about the logs. In that case, the logs take precedence, and the database should be updated appropriately when someone makes a move. Regarding your games, the Logs page says it is your turn in three games, and when I clicked on them, it indeed did appear to be your turn. Sometimes, because of sporadic 503 errors, a move does not get saved to the log, and it has to be done over. I'm still working on optimizing the website more, but sporadic 503 errors do seem to be an improvement over the site shutting down for hours. So, as annoying as it may be, it is progress over what was happening before.

All right, I understand and recognize the effort and dedication you are putting to gradually improve this wonderful website. Thousand thanks for that!

I accepted 2 games of Chinese Chess - 1 from SxG and 1 from Dank Magician.  Both still appear as open invitations, though if you click to accept, again, it says that the invitation was already accepted.

These might have been missed while I was converting the GameLogs table from MyISAM to InnoDB. Once you start moving, the database records for these logs will be updated. Click on the link to view the game, then click on "Nick Wolff to move." For the other game, sxg can click on the link to view, then on the button that says "sxg to move." If you have further problems like this with the database, let me know, since then it could be because of a problem with InnoDB.

That works great.  Thanks, Fergus!

Hi Fergus. My game below timed out, but it still shows as an active game.Can you please change the status of the game to completed? Thanks.

/play/pbm/play.php?game=Modern+Shatranj&log=j_carrillo_vii-louisxii-2017-127-802

When you enter a userid, this page will now tell you how many games the person with that userid can move in. Conventionally, this is you, and it is written as how many games you can move in. This number is based on all the games you can move in, whether or not they show up on the page. When it is zero, this page will use AJAX to periodically check whether it is your turn in any game. Once it is, it will refresh the page with a beeping sound, and it will stop checking if it is your turn in any other games. If you are playing multiple games, using the logs page to keep track of which games you can move in next will be simpler than keeping multiple tabs open for each game.

But Fergus, it's not my turn in that game.

The game timed out and should be finished.

It is still showing as an active game and this is incorrect.

/play/pbm/play.php?game=Modern+Shatranj&log=j_carrillo_vii-louisxii-2017-127-802

When someone loses on time, it is supposed to automatically update the database with correct information. I fixed it to make it do what it is supposed to do, and you are now listed as the winner of this game.

Thanks Fergus.

Here is another one of my games that ended in checkmate, but the status of the game was never change to "finished":

/play/pbm/play.php?game=Fischer+Random+Chess&log=j_carrillo_vii-josesanfer-2004-151-422

Can you please change the status to a win for white? Thanks in advance.

I programmed Game Courier to be more self-correcting, then let it write the database entries.

Fergus,

You set the checkmated player as the winner.

White won, not black.

/play/pbm/play.php?game=Fischer+Random+Chess&log=j_carrillo_vii-josesanfer-2004-151-422

Please correct and thank you!

Okay, it has now entered the correct winner.

I changed the form from the post method to the get method, so that it will show up when you go back with the back button. Since including a password field is not secure with the get method, I removed it from the form. If you need to be signed in to see private games, you can sign in through the form in the menu.

Fergus, in the Comment section (here) I see this sentence above the comments: "SELECT * FROM Comment WHERE IsDeleted=0 ORDER BY CommentID DESC LIMIT 25". (I use Chrome in Windows 10.)

That's a recreation of the SQL used to query the database for the comments displayed on the page. For those who understand SQL, it is informational. For those who don't, it is not. It is useful for me to see this, because the comments page generates the SQL it uses to query the database.

I cannot see an Universal chess game I was playing against per hommerberg. Any reason why?

I did not see any recent logs for Universal Chess. The latest is from 2016, and you weren't one of the players. What might have happened is that your opponent deleted the log. Players are allowed to do this, and you could ask him if he did that.

Could be, I will thanks!

Hello,

I have something like 10 days ago launched challenges for many game among which Balbo's chess, Asylum Redux, Butterfly chess. Now I see that I have "drawn" these games, but I have not actually played any of them. What is most likely to have happened is that some people have accepted the challenges and then because of maybe broken game code code, the program considered those game drawn. In the case of Butterfly chess sxg has re-challenged me and now a game is on the way :)! So  the problem may be somehow circumvented, but that is just an temporary solution. I'm willing to help these cases for 2 reasons. I have the time and decent knowlledge, and also these days I am trying "many" games I find interesting so it is likely I'll stumble upond such cases. Admitedly this is not a thorough search but even here and there if if dense enough could help very much :)! May I receive some guidance?

chess with wizards, chess68, cannons of chesstonia seem to all fall under the same category :(!

I just had an similar experience with falcon chess, and that one is very well done, could it be a deeper problem?

I first checked play.php for code that would set the game as drawn, and I found none that could have been responsible. I then took a look at one of the logs. It was saying "has won" and "has won on time." This indicated that the problem was not with setting the game as drawn but with declaring a winner when there was none. This was due to code that updates the status of games the clock has run down on. I modified this code to not operate before an invitation has been accepted. Since this didn't yet explain why the games were marked as drawn, I checked the database entry. The game was marked as ended, and the winner field was blank, which the logs page interprets to mean that a game is drawn. The winner field was blank, because the code had set $winner to the value of $opponent, but $opponent had not yet been set. I have now deleted the affected logs, and I hope the problem will be fixed now.

Cool, so much public thanks Fergus! You defineatly made my day :)!

@Fergus,

Hello,

I apologize for bugging you all the time, but the Jetan preset seems to be broken :)! Could you offer some help?

Okay, I fixed it, and I since it doesn't use a settings file, I also fixed your log. I may look into programming a settings file for it that enforces the rules.

Once again Fergus, a warm thank you is in order :)!

Hello,

I am playing a game of musketter chess where I am black. When it camed to place my 2 extra pieces on the "fake" back rank i could not. The error was something like cannot include chess3 (I am not quoting). I tried several comands but the proper one seems to be h e5-g9; s d5-e9; It does not work :(!

Could someone help me?

It doesn't work and hasn't been fixed yet. Just delete your Musketeer Chess logs for now.

WildeEurasian Chess seems to not work and I'd like to play it. Please help :)!

I realized the problem could be more widespread than just the few presets brought to my attention, and I used grep to find all the .html files with urlencoded form data. I then began decoding the form data, making use of the MIME Tools plugin for Notepad++. But as I was doing this, I noticed that Game Courier itself was creating forms with urlencoded data. I initially changed the code to stop doing this. Later, I searched for "urldecode" in play.php, and I found a place where it was urldecoding form data, but it was doing it only when the string contained %20, which is the code for a space. According to the comments, it previously worked when a string contained a + sign, which is also used for a space. I had changed this, because presets for Shogi and related games used the + sign in the names of promoted pieces, and using urldecode was causing bugs by changing the names of these pieces. With that in mind, I removed the conditional and changed urldecode to rawurldecode, which would convert %20 to a space but not + to a space. So, it will now urldecode all form data, and I'm assuming that a string that isn't urlencoded will not be altered by rawurlencode. Since I did that, I also reinstated the code for urlencoding form data. I then tested a preset that had been broken by not urldecoding all the form data, and it now worked. This saves me from continuing to decode form data file by file.

Good news :)!

Fergus,

When I search all the Latrunculi XXI games played in Game Courier with this lynk:

/play/pbm/logs.php?game=Latrunculi+XXI&age=0&stat=any

it shows that for game: erik-cvgameroom-2017-340-466 that erik won, which is incorrect.

If you go to the game itself, it shows that Black (me!) won the game. (erik was playing white).

A difference between this game and many other Latrunculi XXI games is that this game was finished with the "won" command, instead of the "resign" command.

Maybe you need to tweak the "won" command so that it shows the correct winner in the Game Logs page.

It's also on a couple more games of your variant, Jose.  You beat me in ours and it shows me as won, too.

Thanks Nick.

I never noticed before.

Fergus, there is definitely something wrong with the "won" command and how it assigns the winner in the finished games log.

Here is another example:

/play/pbm/play.php?game=Latrunculi+XXI&log=j_carrillo_vii-wolff-2016-339-951

I won the game as Black, but in the finished games log it shows Nick (White) as the winner.

Fergus,

Here is another game with a problem:

/play/pbm/play.php?game=Latrunculi+XXI&log=j_carrillo_vii-cvgameroom-2017-345-008

I was White, and I won the game. (I used the "won" command to end the game).

Somehow the colors were switched between the players, and I ended up being Black and losing the game.

Please correct it. Thanks.

I don't know why the following log of a finished played game by one/two people (that are not me) is included in the list of my logs as listed by 'Your Games on Game Courier' (as found in the sub-menu under my name in the CVP main menu). An anomoly? I've seen that current open invitations by other people (besides my own invites issued), and recent finished game logs of games played by me are sometimes (but not always, for some reason) included. Anyway, I don't know if the log I'm referring to (see below) has affected my GC rating in any way:

/play/pbm/play.php?game=General+Chess&log=olbog-cvgameroom-2006-25-442

Somehow this game has no one assigned as playing black.  Not sure how that happened.  When you pick the Your Games, by default, it shows open invitations also.  Basically, including invitations adds a "where opponent is null" criteria to the query which is probably why this log is getting pulled in.  I bet if you set it to only show finished games, this one will no longer show up (even though it is indeed a finished game.)

Yes, that mysterious log does disappear when setting to only finished games for me.

Ok, good.  That means it isn't showing up because it's connected to you (so it can't affect your rating.)  It is showing up because, since it is missing a player, it is getting caught by the query to find invitations.  The query could probably be modified, but since this game shouldn't have entered this state to begin with, I'm inclined to just delete it.

For the following game's log, my opponent was indicated to have lost on time under 'Your Games on Game Courier' (under that sub-menu item under my name in the main menu), but the log didn't show up or count as a finished game (i.e. with me winning on time) until after I had clicked on the log's link, under 'Your Games on Game Courier'. Not sure that's exactly how games that are wins on time are properly put into & stored in the database, so I thought maybe it was worth mentioning - otherwise all's well that ends well, I suppose:

/play/pbm/play.php?game=Backlash&log=panther-cvgameroom-2017-349-290

@Fergus,

Hello,

I am playing a mortal shogi game against wdtr2. There seems to be a bug as with an bishop exchance he seems to have got a GG in hand where I a bishop :)!

@Fergus @ wdtr2

wdtr2, I hope you see this :)!

I think I see what went one, you had promoted your bishop to a dragon horse which I caputred. And it demoted to bishop. You on the other hand, wdtr2 have captured a bishop which has been demoted to GG. I guess that is it, no bug.

Sorry Fergus, for botherring you. It is my first such game and I still have trouble with tactics .

@fergus, Catugo and I just attempted to play Mortal Shogi, something seems to be a bit off.  Either I do not understand the rules, or there might be a bug.   If you review the our recent game, can you see if there is something off?  During my knight capture it seemed to me the knight did not go into the capture tray, but in the next turn after that, it seemed to be there.    @catugo said a knight capture became a pawn.  If you want we could play a game together as a way to debug the game.  If you are willing to do that.  Maybe everything is working right, but the game felt off. 

Please post a link to the game log and I will take a look.  The pieces should change when captured.  A knight becomes a pawn.  Every time a piece is captured it becomes one step weaker.

In one case towards the end of the game it did not :)! Here is a link to the game in question : /play/pbm/play.php?game=Mortal+Shogi&log=catugo-cvgameroom-2018-82-677

You appear to be playing Mortal Shogi without a settings file. In fact, it looks like Mortal Shogi doesn't even have a settings file. I should be able to make one by modifying the one used for Kamikaze Mortal Shogi.

Thank Fergus :)!

Note to Fergus:

There appears to be a bug in the rules enforcing Chess preset. When I try to play ...Qd1 (with checkmate) in the following game, I get a long error message:

/play/pbm/play.php?game=Chess&log=panther-tim_olena-2018-71-812

That's now fixed, Kevin. The won command ended with a colon instead of a semicolon. Now it ends with a semicolon.

Thanks Fergus

I finished that game as I had wished to, and it has also been rated by Game Courier.

It seems that I cannot make a challenge in the game named Crab Chess. Anyone any idea why?

Thanks to some technical difficulties having to do with erroneous reports of the disk space being full, Game Courier wrote some empty logs and backups yesterday and maybe earlier too. When both the log and its backup are empty, there is no more record of the game unless it can be recontructed from the emails sent to both players. If you are unable to do this, it would be best to delete your log using the Delete link provided on this page. You can delete your log as long as you are one of the players, or I can do it if need be. It is important to go through Game Courier to delete logs, because it will also handle deleting database entries for those logs.

Due to the danger of writing both an empty log and an empty backup, the backup procedure needs to be made more robust. I plan to make it more robust by adding in some redundancy and error checking. It should work like this. First, it should make a backup of the backup. It should check this against the backup. If they are not the same, it should stop with an error message indicating that logs cannot be saved right now, and it would be best to come back and try again later. If it successfully makes a faithful copy of the backup, it should then copy the log to the backup and check whether the two files are the same. If not, it should stop with a similar error message. If these two backups succeed, it should then update the log and check whether it is empty. If it is empty, it should report an error message that the log was not successfully saved and to try again later. If it did save to a non-empty file, it should proceed to report its success and to send an email to the other player.

I have now made the backup procedure more robust, as described in the previous comment.

Because of the possibility that problems with the file system could cause a log or a backup to be written as an empty file, I have now programmed Game Courier to use the backup in place of the log if the log is empty or to use the backup's backup if both the log and its backup are empty. In the event that everything is empty, or the file to be used doesn't exist, it will give an error message and recommend deletion of the log. So, if you have lost both the log and its backup, you can now find out and take action to delete it.

Before even writing the backups, Game Courier will check how much free disk space is left. Although it is unlikely that it will ever run out of actual free disk space, the file system sometimes reports this erroneously, and when it does, it ends up writing an empty file. To prevent the writing of empty files, Game Courier will now stop before writing any files if it is reported that there is no free disk space left.

You should now be able to actually delete logs that ended up empty due to problems with the file system. I had to fix two problems to make this work. First, there was a Catch-22 of ending the script prematurely when the log and its backup were both empty even when you were trying to delete them. I had to add an exception in for that. Second, it couldn't tell from an empty log who the player and opponent were. So, when these values are no longer available from the log, it now gets them from the database. With these changes made, I emptied a log of a game with myself, and I emptied its backup too, and without using the account that gives me special deletion privileges, I was able to delete it from the other account I was playing it with.

Attn Fergus:

I won the following game on time (as the second player to move in the setup position) after 33 days expired (even sooner, i.e. after just 3 days, according to what I read back then on 'Your Games on Game Courier', but the clock of my opponent then continued to count down 30 more days). It shows up as a won game for me on 'Your Games on Game Courier' now, but is not shown as a finished game as found by the link for those on the CVP main page. Fwiw, my GC rating did change slightly immediately after I clicked on the log for this game, after I read in it that I had won:

/play/pbm/play.php?game=Shogi&log=panther-cvgameroom-2018-112-730

It does show up as a finished game. Search for the log specifically, and set the Age filter to "Anytime", and it does show up.

Hi Fergus

I was just wondering if my opponent was doomed to lose on time anyway, after the first 3 days had gone by and 'Your Games on Game Courier' showed me that he was 'Out of Time' (though as I wrote, his clock continued for another 30 days). Also, I do see that the game is recorded as finished, e.g. in the list of finished Shogi games, but it shows that I won the game on time more than 30 days ago, rather than very recently.

What I was trying to get at was, is all of what I wrote about this log and my win on time in accordance with how Game Corier is supposed to work, in regard to losses on time if a player fails to make his first move with White before just 3 days elapse? If not, that's why I brought it to your attention, because I thought this was an old problem with Game Courier that had been fixed.

Looking at the time controls, I see there were 3 days of grace time and 30 days of spare time. If the game ended when the grace time ran out but there was still 30 days of spare time left, that's a problem. I'll have to look into this, and if your opponent was unable to move during those 30 days, I should delete your log, because it wasn't his fault for running out of time.

I issued an invitation to my other account for Shogi with time controls of 3 minutes grace time and 30 days spare time. The first thing I noticed is that all the time is on the same clock, and it is yellow. The three minutes should have been on a green clock with the 30 days on the other clock.

Next, the time right now is aproximately 29 days, 23:02:00. That's no longer accurate, since it keeps counting down. Although it was just minutes ago when I issued and accepted the invitation, it appears to be off by an hour. It should be 30 days and 2 minutes, not 29 days, 23 hours, and 2 minutes.

The inaccuracy in adding up the time may account for why all the time is on one clock, and that clock is yellow.

Another problem is that although I chose white as duniho, and it says on the screen that duniho is white, and the menu shows that is who I am signed in as, Game Courier is telling me it is not my turn yet.

Going to the Logs page, it says the next move is for fergus.

Now I remember that Black goes first in Shogi. So I have to start this experiment over.

I was just going to start a new experiment after lunch, and I noticed that my Shogi game was now out of time. I tried moving as fergus, and I was able to. Inspecting the database, I found no record in FinishedGames, and the one in GameLogs was still ongoing.

It looks like the problem was that it was miscalculating the deadline when it updated the database after someone accepted an invitation. One of the conditions for calculating the part of the time left that included spare time was empty($invitation), but when an invitation was accepted, the value of $invitation was not changed until later in the script. Changing this to (empty($invitation) || ($submit == "Accept")) allowed the calculation of the deadline to go through as it should when an invitation was accepted. This may have been missed for a while, because it didn't pose a problem when someone moved within the grace time set in the time controls.

What happened with this game?: /play/pbm/play.php?game=Fischer+Random+Chess&log=panther-cvgameroom-2018-112-736&userid=makov333

Fixed. I modified the piecekeys function to return an empty array when the value of $piecekeys is not an array, and that allowed foreach to work with the value it returned.

Attn Fergus:

I'm playing a game of Frog Chess with wdtr2, and I saw a pecuiar error message when I tried to view the log. At the time of my posting this, it's no longer my turn as far as I know:

/play/pbm/play.php?game=Frog+Chess&log=panther-cvgameroom-2018-161-106

The server was acting as though there was no space left today and yesterday. I programmed Game Courier to halt the saving of logs if this happened again, but maybe it didn't work. I'm shutting down my computer for tonight, but I'll look into this more tomorrow.

They all have the same timestamp of 6/16/2018 10:39:26 PM. I think timestamps are given in GMT. So, this would be around 6:39 PM EST on Saturday. Given that the timestamps are exactly the same, this was all done at once, and the error checking I had in place wasn't enough to stop the saving of logs. This involved using file_get_contents on the newly written file and checking whether it was empty or didn't match what was written. I am also now using filesize, and if either one fails, it should stop before it rewrites everything as an empty file.

However, now I see what may be the problem. It first checked the value of file_put_contents, and if this failed, it gave a warning instead of a fatal error. I am now making this into a fatal error that exits the script.

I made a backup of the site last month, but your Frog Chess log was too recent to be included in it. I also made a backup yesterday, but that was too late. This log is unrecoverable, but you can start the game over. According to the database record I just deleted, your opponent was wdtr2.

Okay, thanks Fergus. Judging by my listing of logs of my currently unfinished Game Courier games, I can see that you've deleted that Frog Chess game log.

Fergus,

I'm getting this error message when I'm trying to play in my game below:

Error: The logfile at ../pbmlogs/petteia_xxi/j_carrillo_vii-cvgameroom-2018-146-869.php is missing, or something is misspelled.

- -

[email protected]
To:j_carrillo_vii
Jul 9 at 2:15 PM
Here is the latest move in the game of Petteia XXI between you and per hommerberg:

25... s i5-h5

To make your move, follow this URL:

/play/pbm/play.php?game%3DPetteia+XXI%26log%3Dj_carrillo_vii-cvgameroom-2018-146-869%26userid%3Dj_carrillo_vii

--

Is there a problem with the database, or was the game deleted?

It looks like the log was deleted. There is no entry for it in the database, and all that is left is the backup. You can ask per31 if he deleted it.

Fergus,

Can you please restore the backup?

Thanks.

I renamed the backup to a php file, and it is currently your opponent's turn. Once he moves, the database entry will be recreated, and it will show up on the logs page again. Since it is not showing up there now, inform your opponent that he has to repeat his last move for the game to continue, and send him a link to the log.

Fergus

My opponent ran out of time in this game: 

/play/pbm/play.php?game=Modern+Random+Chess&log=j_carrillo_vii-cvgameroom-2018-172-521

However the game is still showing active in the Game Courier Game Logs page.

Can you fix the status of this game as the game is completed?

Is there something I need to do to the preset to prevent thiscondition from happening? 

Thanks.

It's not showing up as active on the Logs page. It says you won.

Как в игре сделать ход? Я не могу сделать ход. Не работает кнопка отправить ход

Do you mean in your current Game Courier game?  It doesn't appear to be your turn yet.

You should request aid in just one place; this one seems the most reasonable, so I'll remove your other comments.

(By the way, I'm relying on Google translate for your messages, so apologies if I misunderstand.)

My move in the party. I can not make a move. No button to make a move. Writes an error. How can I make a move in the party? Help

This preset now uses the new code for identifying check, checkmate, and stalemate. Let me know of any problems with it.

ILLEGAL: p g9-g7; on turn 2:

There was no p on g9. It is an empty space.

Go back with your browser's BACK button, reload the page, and try again.

I'm having trouble playing a game of Storm the Ivory Tower. When I click on my name (trying to start the process of playing a move) I get an error message saying that the logfile is missing or else something is misspelled:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Storm%2520the%2520Ivory%2520Tower&log=panther-cvgameroom-2018-248-226&userid=panther

Another gamelog missing or something misspelled error message, this time for a Chinese Chess game I'm playing:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Chinese%2520Chess&log=panther-cvgameroom-2018-248-211&userid=panther

Another logfile missing or something misspelled message, this time for a Chess with Different Armies game:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Chess%2520with%2520Different%2520Armies&log=panther-cvgameroom-2018-248-218&userid=panther

An error message for a game of Gross Chess of mine:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Gross%2520Chess&log=panther-cvgameroom-2018-248-216&userid=panther

Okay, that's all fixed. I was rewriting the code without the use of a deprecated feature, and I didn't quite get it right last night.

I have a bug with Gross Chess.  This log is incorrectly calling a stalemate.  (It didn't actually end the game, but it won't let me move either.)

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Gross+Chess&log=panther-cvgameroom-2018-248-216&userid=mageofmaple

Or maybe it's a larger problem.  CwDA is doing this as well:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Chess+with+Different+Armies&log=panther-cvgameroom-2018-248-218&userid=mageofmaple

There was a typo in my last change to Game Courier. Fixing that fixed the problem.

I cannot post in the Game Courier Logs thread for some reason. In the following game log my opponent played a move and did not checkmate, yet he was declared the winner. The preset was rules enforcing:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Shogi&log=panther-cvgameroom-2018-248-210

That may have happened when the typo I made introduced a bug in the code. I corrected the results for this game in the log and the database.

Still cannot comment in the Game Logs thread. This time an error declared me winner in a game I didn't move in:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Modern+Shatranj&log=panther-cvgameroom-2018-248-220

That was due to a coding mistake I made yesterday. I replaced the count function with is_array($op1) && count($op1) instead of is_array($op1) ? count($op1) : 0, and the result was that the actual count was replaced with 1 whenever it was positive. I fixed that, corrected your log and its database entries, fixed the problem with posting here, and moved your comments from where you originally made them.

I don't understand what happened in the following game log. It looks like my opponent might have illegally taken back some moves:

https://www.chessvariants.com/play/pbm/play.php?game=Shatranji&log=panther-cvgameroom-2018-248-225&movenum=21&submit=View&orientation=auto&scale=100&render=table&shape=square&set=alfaerie1&colors=336633+DEDEAD+4682B4

He might have done it accidentally, since he repeated the same move.

Okay Fergus, I replayed my move (at the point before I dropped a captured pawn on b7). If it happens again I'll be tempted to just delete all my games that I have with this player, depite that I think I'm doing fine in all of them. Remember, he is the one Carlos complained about earlier.

Carlos was jumping the gun about him. He was using translated pages, and these weren't sending the correct submit values to Game Courier. I recommended that he use English pages, and in the meantime, I fixed the problem with translated pages, so that they would work too.

It's strange, I've had this problem with Sergey, too, but only in Shatranji.  I'm playing a number of other games with him and they're all fine.  But in our Shatranji game he kept going back again and again when I would make a nasty drop.  Eventually he resigned.  I suspect he doesn't understand the drop rules.

I'll see if my wife is interested in translating something about drops, or maybe the Shatranji page.  (She's fluent in Russian but not in Chess variants...)