| 1 | p. |
| 2 | This website was born after Patrick Bernier told me about |
| 3 | a variant he invented, called 'l'Échiqueté', which involves mixed pieces, |
| 4 | half-black and half-white. Back then in 2012, I developed a small website |
| 5 | allowing to play by correspondance with this variant only. I already had |
| 6 | in mind other variants to be added to the website, 'Zen chess' being the |
| 7 | first on the list because it changed so much the thinking process that I |
| 8 | was very curious to play it. |
| 9 | |
| 10 | p. |
| 11 | After a long break, a prototype website allowing to play |
| 12 | live games was tested in the end of 2017, with only a few players. |
| 13 | One year later the first version of the final website was published: |
| 14 | it offered three modes, against a human, a computer engine or analyzing, |
| 15 | with about twenty variants available. The current website is a more modern |
| 16 | rewriting of this initial version: it now has the basic features expected |
| 17 | from a chess playing website :) |
| 18 | |
| 19 | p. |
| 20 | From the main Hall, you can see and talk to online players, |
| 21 | send and accept challenges (live or correspondance), and also watch current |
| 22 | games. If this is your first contact with chess variants, you probably should |
| 23 | start with the 'Variants' page from the top menu: it explains all the rules |
| 24 | and allows to observe sample games or play against basic bots. Finally, |
| 25 | at any moment in a game you can click on the 'Analyze' button to analyze |
| 26 | the position. Try not to do that in live games, your opponent would know ;) |
| 27 | |
| 28 | p |
| 29 | a(href="https://github.com/yagu0/vchess") The source code |
| 30 | | is freely available on Github: the main ingredients are Express, Node.js, |
| 31 | | Vue and Webpack. The chosen DBMS is SQLite for now because of its simplicity. |
| 32 | | It can be easily changed if needed later. All contributions are welcome: |
| 33 | ul |
| 34 | li Translations: see client/src/translations/ folder |
| 35 | li. |
| 36 | Styling: see <style> parts of .vue files |
| 37 | in client/src/{components,views} |
| 38 | li. |
| 39 | Back-end and front-end code: a lot can be improved! |
| 40 | Feel free to send pull requests :) |
| 41 | |
| 42 | p |
| 43 | | A considerable number of people helped for this website, |
| 44 | | testing, giving ideas, motivating me to achieve this project. Thanks in |
| 45 | | relatively random order to Patrick Bernier, Frédéric Fradet, Olive Martin, |
| 46 | | Bevis Martin, Laurent Nouhaud and Christian Poisson for early testing and |
| 47 | | advices from 2012; to Yovann Gatineau and Anatole Vlachos for their |
| 48 | | enthusiasm about the website; to Jérôme Auclair who told me about the |
| 49 | | Dynamo variant; to Nathalie Merlin and lichess players O42, oceansideview, |
| 50 | | okei and opperwezen who tested |
| 51 | a(href="https://lichess.org/forum/general-chess-discussion/vchessclub--play-chess-variants?page=10") the 2018/12 version |
| 52 | | ; and of course to the websites |
| 53 | a(href="https://schemingmind.com/") schemingmind.com |
| 54 | | and |
| 55 | a(href="https://www.chessvariants.com/") chessvariants.com |
| 56 | | which are two great resources about variants. |
| 57 | | If I forget someone in this list, sorry and please tell me! |