Comments/Ratings for a Single Item

Well... sometimes four ranks, occasionally five... and then there are the 3D variants.

But I support H.G.'s suggestion, in principle.

Well, showing the setup would just be one thing we could do. But we would not have to stick rigorously to that in cases where it is inconvenient. We could also just show the image of a representative piece (e.g. a Lion in case of Chu Shogi). The point would be to attract attention. Not to convey information.

Yeah, that's why I supported in principle. And I think the policy should be exactly as you just described.

Looking at games that have already been nominated and seconded, I'll make Expanded Chess the featured variant for September, 2023. It is the most favorited of games that have been nominated and seconded, and it has a good web page. I considered Sac Chess, which I'm more familiar with and would personally like to feature, but I think its page has some more room for improvement.

Fergus Duniho wrote wrote on 2023-09-01 UTC "Looking at games that have already been nominated and seconded, I'll make Expanded Chess the featured variant for September, 2023. It is the most favorited of games that have been nominated and seconded, and it has a good web page. I considered Sac Chess, which I'm more familiar with and would personally like to feature, but I think its page has some more room for improvement."

I have substantially edited the Sac Chess Rules Page (especially the Notes Section). See if you like it better now, Fergus.

P.S.: From the Recognized Variants thread, on the topic of Primary Items (from an exchange I had with Fergus that I'd forgotten - may be a good idea to post this in the present thread, too):

Fergus Duniho wrote on 2020-04-03 EDT 'That's something that David Howe instituted so that the most important pages would be at the top of the list when listing search results. I think he largely included the Recognized Variants, though some other things are also included. It might be a good idea to replace Recognized Variants and Primary Items with Featured Games and Featured Pages, the former being a subset of the latter. Featured pages would be ones that we want to draw greater attention to or that we expect users would be looking for more. These could include links to games that enough of us think highly of, links to well-known or popular games, and links to commercially available commercial games. These could be featured at the top of search results, as Primary Items are, but referred to as Featured Pages instead. Also, they could be a bit more dynamic than Recognized Variants, meaning we could drop something from the Featured Pages, such as a commercial game no longer being made, or a game that has been reevaluated.'

I experimented a bit with an image in the featured-variant notice, to attract more attention to it. Expanded Chess still seemed small enough to show a complete single army. I suppose I could even have cut off the 4th rank (of which I left enough to indicate it is empty), as a rank of Pawns would already be assumed to be the most-forward populated rank.

Please tell me what you think!

I think it looks great!

A modest suggestion.

If it is about promoting a chess variant using images, wouldn't it be better to use animated GIFs, like, for example, the one I insert below made by Hans Bodlaender in 1998 to illustrate The Bishops Conversion Rule?

I certainly know that everything editors do is voluntary. But I can't help but ask, is it very difficult to create an animated GIF? Or is the web space too "expensive" to not be able to make a square banner instead of a rectangular one?

If the reason is that the suggested banner would be unsightly to the taste of those who are promoting variants (since it would look grotesque), that's fine... I haven't said anything!

I once made an animated GIF (see left) following instructions from the internet, and it was not terribly difficult, provided you used a drawing program that supported this function. But you first have to create an image for each position in the game, so that would take two orders of magnitude more work than creating a static image of a single position.

But for presenting chess games I think animated GIFs are a very poor tool. They run through the game at a fixed speed, which is too fast to notice anything of interest, and annoyingly slow for the uninteresting part you have to go through to reach what you really want to see. For Chess games I think it is very important to be able to control the stepping, so you can view each position for the time it deserves.

Therefore I think it would be much better to use an Interactive Diagram configured as game viewer, with its own 'button bar' of control buttons put somewhere on the page. This is much easier to create too; you just have to create the Diagram once, and add a parameter moveList=... to it with all the moves of the game. Such as shown at the end of this comment. (Refresh browser cache first!)

But in the case of the Featured-Variant box I don't think this would be a good idea at all. Showing a whole board would make the box too large, (I think showing an entire 3-rank camp is already stretching it), and showing part of the board of an animated game seems pointless. Then it would not do more than having something flashing there. And I guess most people would consider this annoying rather than attractive. There is a fine line between being noticeable and being a distraction. Text can only be understood if you first focus your attention on it, so that it can be read. So those who would not systematically scan all elements of the page (which includes scrutinizing all adds...) easily miss it, no matter how important the message might be. Unlike an image, which you process intuitively whenever it is in your field of view, in parallel with whatever else you were looking at, and gives you a subconscious clue as to whether you would want to look at it. Motion, however, draws your attention away from what you were really interested in all the time.

I have a policy against animated ads, because they are too distracting.

For some reason, this diagram is making an error message "ambiguous illegal move 3. Wf4" to pop up on my screen.

Refresh your browser cache.

The problem occurs because the betza.js script did not keep move lists per Diagram. So when I posted a Diagram with a move list, it gets confused, and tries to perform the moves in Mirko Mirko's Diagram on the same page. (Which of course leads to an illegal move rather quickly.) I patched it now such that it remembers which Diagram contained the move list, and only loads the game into that one. But you have to flush the old version out of the cache first.

My remark is probably silly. Everytime I flush my browser cache I'm loosing all the pwd I have saved. Is there a way I may do to avoid this, I have the same popup "ambiguous illegal move 3. Wf4" but I would like to avoid the pain of entering all pwd etc. just to remove this popup?

In FireFox I flush the cache by refreshing the page with the Shift key pressed. This only deletes everything associated with the current page.

Most browser algorithms always load the page with the URL that you are requesting, and rely on cached data only for the files it links to (like images, style files and scripts). So if the above is not possible for you it might work to directly access the betza script through the link

http://chessvariants.com/membergraphics/MSinteractive-diagrams/betza.js?nocache=true

The latest version should contain the word listGame .

That does seem to have worked. :)

Yes, thanks HG

I am a bit unhappy with the way we select featured variants, because it seem to lead to a presentation that is very much biased towards what we could call "Chess with Alternative Armies": variants that differ from orthodox Chess by the participation of a view pieces that move with slightly different leaps, perhaps on a somewhat larger board. Now I admit that these are the variants that I like best too, but the world of chess variants offers so much more.

Perhaps we should reconsider the idea that we should feature mainly variants that are already popular on this site. Our regular visitors will already know those, and others will be guided to those easily enough by other mechanism (such as the Our Favorites menu item, or the Game Courier logs). If the featured variants do exactly the same thing, it really serves no purpose at all. I think it would be much more useful to feature variants that involve some rather original concept.

And then I don't mean "wow, this has a piece that makes a (0,3) leap", but rather pieces that explode on capture (Atomic Chess), need to be captured twice before they disappear (Golem Chess), involve move induction (Knight Relay Chess), can swap pieces (Odin's Rune Chess), morph into other types (Kyoto Shogi, Bishop-Knight Morph Factor), have moves that depend on location (Elk Chess). Also multi-move variants (Marseillais, Chieftain Chess), multiple royalty (Extinction Chess), 'capture the flag' winning conditions (King of the Hill, Racing Kings), alternative winning conditions (Three-Checks, Suicide), neutral pieces (Duck Chess), incomplete information (Dark Chess), irregular board shapes (Balbo's Chess), irregular tilings (Singularity Chess). It seems to me most of these peculiarities have no chance at all to be in any featured variant, the way we go about it now.

I second this: feature games that show some sort of innovative thinking. It's part of how I came up with Blender Chess, Dealer's Chess, Zwangkrieg, Chess on a Tesseract, and (to a lesser extent) Short Sliders (and the Leapers Who Love Them). I could easily nominate Pick-the-Team Chess or Deconstruction Chess for their creativity.

I think Shatranj of Troy would be good to feature.

Of the games that have been nominated and seconded, Sac Chess and Hectochess are the only ones I identified that can be played through either Game Courier or against a computer with a program. Both are supported by ChessV and Ai Ai. In addition to this, Hectochess already had an Interactive Diagram on its page, though Sac Chess did not.

Since Hectochess is a descendant of Gross Chess, which was recently featured, I decided to go with Sac Chess for October. So, I found an interactive diagram for it in the comments and added it to the page. I also added some piece graphics, some links to Piececlopedia articles and related games mentioned in the text, and some changes to the HTML and text.

If you're interested in having other games featured, please make sure they are playable both online, preferably through Game Courier, and against a computer opponent, ideally Zillions-of-Games or stronger.

What is status of Metamachy now in this process?

What is status of Metamachy now in this process?

It was nominated, but no one has seconded it.

If you're interested in having other games featured, please make sure they are playable both online, preferably through Game Courier, and against a computer opponent, ideally Zillions-of-Games or stronger.

This is good information to have. I definitely want to make GC and ZoG for Short Sliders (the one game that I've submitted so far that I think is most worthy), though I also intend to work on Desert Dust, Hundred Acre Chess, and Zwangkrieg, as well as others that I haven't posted yet.

I think my two apothecary games are fulfilling your criteria, Fergus. Maybe someone may nominate one or both. Unfortunately for my 12 x 12 games, chessV does not support Rn then bishop or Bn then Rook!