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I have rewritten most of this page with updated information from Jean-Louis Cazaux's excellent new book A World of Chess, co-authored with Rick Knowlton. The previous version had the initial setup incorrect (both of a player's bishops on the same color) and incorrectly identified the author of a book on chess variants as the game's inventor. Additional historical information has also been added.

I still need to make a similar revision to The Emperor's Game

Ok, I updated this page in the manner I would propose for general usage. Everything seems to be ok, except that after you move one of black's pieces, the color of the dark squares changes to a gray and stays that way.

OK, that looks good. Except for those with JavaScript switched off.

To cure that there should be a static image as alternative (screenshot?), in <noscript> tags. Perhaps together with a message that points out what they are missing):

<noscript>
<p>You can play against this diagram if JavaScript is on</p>
<img src="....">
</noscript>

And you can add display:none; to the style of the <div> conaining the interactive diagram; the betza.js script would make it visible when it converts the deinition to a board image, and it keeps the definition hidden when JavaScript is off.

The color change is by design. Should really happen on the first click already. This can be suppressed by using darkShade instead of startShade to set the color. Bright colors are often not ideal for playing, especially when colors were used for highlighting. But some diagrams use dark-blue squares, which even camouflage the 'black' Alfaerie pieces.

Changing startShade to darkShade does not seem to have worked.

I added the noscript section. Good call.

Changing startShade to darkShade does not seem to have worked.

Because it has not been changed. Check through 'Show Page Source'. The caching is screwing up things.

[Edit] OK, with ?nocache=true it does seem changed, and indeed it does not work. I will check it out.

[Edit2] OK, should work now. It was interaction between the two diagrams (the one in the Comments is on the same page), where one remembered the 'realColor' of the other. Which was not reset, because startColor and darkColor were not both defined in this diagram. I moved the initialization of realColor to an invalid value from the globals to the routine that parses the diagram definition now.

There is a typo in the German book title, it should read "seine" in place of "siene".

Also, I read the author's name as "Tressan" in accordance with Google OCR. There is a clear bridge between the two stems on the upper part of the last letter of his name. Google search finds the name on several pages where it seems to be removed from the pictures (Probably from bottom lines for the bookbinder, called Bogensignaturen in German language).

I have found the book on Google books here: https://books.google.de/books?id=n64UAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=Tressan&f=false

P.S. Can we complete Peguilhen to Ernest-Frédéric von Lavergne-Peguilhen (1769–1845), recipient of the last letter from Henriette Vogel and Heinrich von Kleist? Life dates and occupation are fitting, and he also went simple by Peguilhen.

Thanks, Jörg! These corrections have been incorporated.

Thanks Greg. Can you update the Emperor's Game as well?

I only notice now that these variants have weird castling rules, where the Rook doesn't end up next to the King. At the moment the diagram doesn't support that. Also for lack of a Betza notation for this. The On castling implies the castling partner ends on the opposit adjacent square.

[Edit] For now I solved this problem by allowing additional specification of the castling type through diagram parameters, rather than introducing new XBetza notation. For this I implemented a new parameter castleGap, default value 1, which corresponds to normal castling. The idea is that for castleGap > 0 the destination of the Rook will be that of the King, minus castleGap times the basic King step. For castleGap=1 the Rook would thus end up next to the King on the inside, while castleGap=2 would leave an empty square between R and K, etc. If castleGap < 1, however, the reference point  is the King's square of origin, instead of the destination. That means that castleGap=-1 gives the type of castling we want here: the Rook ends next to the square where the King started (just as the King ends next to where the Rook started, so that they move by an equal amount.)