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Comments by FergusDuniho
Game Courier Logs. View the logs of games played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since all your logs are currently dated October 16, 2004, I don't know which ones you mean.
<P>Yes, it's my doing. David Howe wanted to print out games for sending to David Pritchard for inclusion in the second edition of his <I>Encyclopedia of Chess Variants</I>. So I added this feature. When I tried to use this new feature to print out positions in my Alice Chess game, my printer wasn't printing the board properly, because it was rendered as a table with background colors and transparent images, but the printer wasn't printing the background colors, and it was printing the color used for the transparent color of the pieces. So I added the PNG and JPG modes to be able to print board images as they appear on the screen.</P>
Game Courier Logs. View the logs of games played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I see two that are dated August 27, 2004, not 2003. No logs are dated earlier than August 27, 2004, because that is the date on which I transferred all the logs from chessvariants.com to chessvariants.org, and the procedure I used for copying the logs did not retain the original timestamps. So I'll go ahead and delete those two.
Who crosses the river first?. A variant on Chinese Chess. (9x10, Cells: 90) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Stephen Leary reported about this game in a FAQ at least eight years ago, but he did not invent it. It appears to be an ancient Xiang Qi variant of unknown origin. It is unlikely that Stephen Leary will read your message in time to respond, since he is not involved with this website, and we don't even have current contact information on him. I can't tell you anything about him myself, because I know nothing about him.
Family matters chess (small). Variant on 41 square board. (Cells: 41) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The images were missing. They were also missing from the last CD ROM I got of the whole site. I don't know why the images were missing, but I managed to retrieve them all from archive.org. So they're back.
Ribbon Boards. Make light, handsome, reshapable Chess variant boards out of Christmas ribbons.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]By a ring board, do you mean what is used for Jumping Chess and Rococo? The boards lie about as flat as the surface you lie them on. Parts of the board become elevated and tilted only when you fold the board into other dimensions by folding part of the board underneath the rest of the board. As a test, I just folded my 12x12 board into an 8x8 board on my bed, whose surface is a memory foam mattress pad, and set up some small hollow plastic pieces. Several of them fell down. I then removed that board and placed my 8x8 Cavalier Chess board in the same place, and set up the same pieces. I shook my bed, which has springs underneath, and the pieces remained standing. As long as you lie the board on a flat surface, such as a table, and don't fold the board, it should be as flat and stable as you need it to be. If folding the board makes it too unstable for your pieces, then you can make more boards of smaller sizes, which you don't have to fold.
I think the technique you describe for making a ring board won't consistently use the same two colors for the outer ring. It will sometimes use some of the inner colors. If you want a board that consistently uses different colors for the outer ring, you can add attachments to the ends of the strips you use for the inner board. These attachments would be in the colors of the outer ring. To make it look seamless, you would have to staple the attachments on in places that go underneath overlapping ribbons.
Flying Chess. Some pieces can fly. (2x(8x8), Cells: 128) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]These recent comments in praise of both Flying Chess and David Eltis seem suspicious. They all arose within a span of three days, and none are from members or anyone previously known to post comments on these pages. All praise the game highly, but none gives a single detail on why the game is any good. And all highly praise the inventor himself. All of the praise in these comments is written in the style of hype, not in the manner of thoughtful evaluation. I would like to ask those who have posted these messages to prove my suspicions wrong. Please give verifiable evidence that you're real people, and please give some details on what you like about this game. This would add a lot to the credibility of your comments.
Harrold Pooter, As you yourself have acknowledged, I do have a point. Moreover, I have not castigated you, I have no control over what you feel like, I have not treated you with disrespect, and I have not treated you like an outsider. It is an unfortunate fact of life that the dishonesty of some people sometimes casts doubt on the honesty of others. You yourself have accused Ho Mosley of dishonesty. It may be that you have been honest with us, but the similarity between your comment and the ones that followed, all purportedly by different people, has given reason for doubting this. Even if your comments are unrelated to those that followed it, there is the appearance of a coordinated campaign to hype up both Flying Chess and David Eltis. You may just be the victim of circumstances, and if you are, I wish merely to see you exonerated. But I can't do it for you. Only you can provide the information that will clear you of suspicion, and so far you haven't done this. Although you have given the name 'Harrold Pooter,' it has not helped. A Google search on this name turned up zero pages. I may as well be clearer about what I suspect. There is only one person I know of who would have a motive for hyping up this game and its inventor. That is David Eltis himself. It is my suspicion that all three of you are David Eltis using different aliases to hype up this game. But I have difficulty accepting this suspicion as fact, because David Eltis is an acclaimed author and college professor and even a fellow alumnus, since we both got our Ph.D.s at the same university, and I would expect such a person to act more ethically. But I have never met him myself and have no firsthand knowledge of his character. So I just don't know what to think. I would prefer to think that my suspicions are wrong, and that is why I have asked for the evidence that they are. If none of you are David Eltis, I would appreciate knowing this for a fact, because I don't want to believe that he would stoop to underhanded tactics to hype up himself and his game.
Someone else has mentioned to me the possibility that some of Dr. Eltis's students are trying to win brownie points by praising him and his game here. This may well be. It seems more plausible to me than the idea that Dr. Eltis himself is masquerading as different people to hype up his game.
At the writing of this page, David Eltis was a history professor at Eton College. The David Eltis I found a website for is a history professor at Emory University. His CV does not mention past employment, but I believe it's the same person, since I have not found mention of any other David Eltis, much less one currently teaching history at Eton.
Rules of Chess FAQ. Frequently asked chess questions.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]No, it is not legal. A King may never move into check.
Sorry, I got a2 confused with b2. The King is not in check at a2, and so moving there is legal.
Flying Chess. Some pieces can fly. (2x(8x8), Cells: 128) [All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Yes, it looks like there are indeed two history teachers named David Eltis. Matters were made confusing because Eton College does not maintain webpages on individual faculty members, and the most prominent David Eltis besides the inventor of this game is a history professor. Also, Eton College has a confusing name. It is not really a college, which is typically a four-year post-secondary school for young adults. In the American language, Eton is a private boarding school for teenage boys. It is what the British call a public school. Thus, the inventor of Flying Chess is someone who knows, and has known, many boys throughout his career, and this makes it likely that the comments I thought of as suspicious were genuine.
OverKnight Chess (old). Members-Only Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
Knightmare Chess. The American version of Tempete sur l'Echiquier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Contrary to what Hans says about this game, I really like the graphics in Knightmare Chess, and I highly recommend this game. David Howe and I have spent many enjoyable hours playing this game. It is a lot of fun, and I consider it tops among Chess variants.
OverKnight Chess (old). Members-Only Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
ChessV. Program for playing numerous Chess variants against your PC.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]I just tried it, and the board went blank after my second move of Fischer Random Chess. It turned black this time instead of white. I did not bother to change the piece set from Alfaerie.
Invent-and-Play. A design contest and a small PBEM tournament, combined![All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The editor who was running this has dropped all of his editorial responsibilities and has not contributed to this site in any way for quite some time now. My understanding is that his job, working with Boy Scouts and running a Boy Scout store, required too much of his time.
OverKnight Chess (old). Members-Only Missing description[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Since this comment is for a page that has not been published yet, you must be signed in to read it.
Game Courier Tournament #1. A multi-variant tournament played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]Roberto's suggestion seems too complex to implement, and it seems too difficult to enforce. Since it would require the cooperation of both players, it could not be enforced simply by exacting time penalties for noncompliance. It would be more practical to just enforce stricter time controls that would be too hard to meet without coordinated sessions. But even putting aside the logistical questions of how coordinated sessions could be enforced, enforcing them just doesn't work out well when two players have very different schedules. Roberto and I have been able to rapidly play games in sessions of moves, because, despite living thousands of miles apart, it is mainly north-south distance, and we live in the same time zone. But it would be more difficult for someone in California and someone in eastern Europe to find the time for coordinated sessions with each other. If we had a tournament with time controls such as this, we would probably have to limit it to people within a certain range of time zones. As for the time contols used for the tournament, they were chosen to be flexible enough for people in different parts of the world with very different schedules who may occassionally have emergencies when they would have to stop playing for a while. Even given this, some people dropped out because they didn't have enough time to play. Nevertheless, given the experience I have now had with these time controls, I would now consider tweaking them. I might make the spare time two weeks instead of one and reduce by half the amount of extra time and bonus time given after each move. This would prevent reserve time from amassing as much, as well as give players some more time for emergencies at the beginning of rounds.
Index page of The Chess Variant Pages. Our main index page.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]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.
Game Courier Logs. View the logs of games played on Game Courier.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]The logs page has been updated this week. It now has a field for filtering logs on the basis of a game's name. This field accepts a wildcard pattern. An * can be used for any game, and a game's name can be used by itself without any wildcard characters. Also, the Status Filter now includes an option for showing only open invitations. This duplicates the functionality of the Waiting Room page, making it unnecessary.
Index page of The Chess Variant Pages. Our main index page.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]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.
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.
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