p.
  This website was born after Patrick Bernier told me about
  a variant he invented, called 'l'Échiqueté', which involves mixed pieces,
  half-black and half-white. Back then in 2012, I developed a small website
  allowing to play by correspondance with this variant only. I already had
  in mind other variants to be added to the website, 'Zen chess' being the
  first on the list because it changed so much the thinking process that I
  was very curious to play it.

p.
  After a long break, a prototype website allowing to play
  live games was tested in the end of 2017, with only a few players.
  One year later the first version of the final website was published:
  it offered three modes, against a human, a computer engine or analyzing,
  with about twenty variants available. The current website is a more modern
  rewriting of this initial version: it now has the basic features expected
  from a chess playing website :)

p.
  From the main Hall, you can see and talk to online players,
  send and accept challenges (live or correspondance), and also watch current
  games. If this is your first contact with chess variants, you probably should
  start with the 'Variants' page from the top menu: it explains all the rules
  and allows to observe sample games or play against basic bots. Finally,
  at any moment in a game you can click on the 'Analyze' button to analyze
  the position. Try not to do that in live games, your opponent would know ;)

p
  a(href="https://github.com/yagu0/vchess") The source code 
  | is freely available on Github: the main ingredients are Express, Node.js,
  | Vue and Webpack. The chosen DBMS is SQLite for now because of its simplicity.
  | It can be easily changed if needed later. All contributions are welcome:
  ul
    li Translations: see client/src/translations/ folder
    li.
      Styling: see <style> parts of .vue files
      in client/src/{components,views}
    li.
      Back-end and front-end code: a lot can be improved!
      Feel free to send pull requests :)

p
  | A considerable number of people helped for this website,
  | testing, giving ideas, motivating me to achieve this project. Thanks in
  | relatively random order to Patrick Bernier, Frédéric Fradet, Olive Martin,
  | Bevis Martin, Laurent Nouhaud and Christian Poisson for early testing and
  | advices from 2012; to Yovann Gatineau and Anatole Vlachos for their
  | enthusiasm about the website; to Jérôme Auclair who told me about the
  | Dynamo variant; to Nathalie Merlin and lichess players O42, oceansideview,
  | okei and opperwezen who tested 
  a(href="https://lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/vchessclub--play-chess-variants?page=10") the 2018/12 version 
  | ; and of course to the websites 
  a(href="https://schemingmind.com/") schemingmind.com 
  | and 
  a(href="https://www.chessvariants.com/") chessvariants.com 
  | which are two great resources about variants.
  | If I forget someone in this list, sorry and please tell me!