Paid membership feature list

1) Games

A possibility to improve the playing experience is usually one of the most frequent reason to upgrade to a higher membership level.

1.1) Number of started games

A free membership allows a player to play only 20 games simultaneously and when this limit is reached, new games cannot be started until the number drops below 20. Higher membership levels solve this problem in the following way:

1.1.1) Brain Bishop and Brain Knight

A player with Brain Bishop or Brain Knight membership level can play up to 50 games simultaneously.

1.1.2) Brain Rook

A player with Brain Rook or higher membership level can play unlimited number of games simultaneously.

1.2) Number of vacation days

Since every BrainKing game is played with a time limit (time per move or time for game), BrainKing contains a system of vacation days, which gives each player a possibility to avoid a sudden loss of a game by a timeout when he is offline for a longer time period (summer holidays, Christmas, etc.). A free membership allows to set up to 10 vacation days a year. Higher membership levels offer better conditions:

1.2.1) Brain Bishop and Brain Knight

A player with Brain Bishop or Brain Knight membership level can use up to 25 vacation days a year. After some vacation days are used, it is possible (twice a year) to get some extra days (during the same year) if the membership is renewed by another year (or longer period) - 10 after the first renewal and 5 after the second one.

1.2.2) Brain Rook

A player with Brain Rook membership level can use up to 35 vacation days a year. After some vacation days are used, it is possible (twice a year) to get some extra days (during the same year) if the membership is renewed by another year (or longer period) - 10 after the first renewal and 5 after the second one.

1.2.3) Black Brain Rook

A player with Black Brain Rook membership level can use up to 45 vacation days a year. After some vacation days are used, it is possible (twice a year) to get some extra days (during the same year) if the player buys a year (or longer) membership (Brain Knight or Brain Rook) for another Brain King user - 10 after the first renewal and 5 after the second one. The purpose of this rule is that a Black Brain Rook member cannot purchase another year of a membership for himself because his membership never expires.

1.3) Automatic vacation

This feature (available for paying members only) adds even more protection to your games to avoid sudden timeouts. If it is turned on (on Settings / Calendar page) and in the event a player's game would otherwise timeout, the automatic vacation setting will use a vacation day (if available) to prevent the loss of that game. Of course, this action happens only if the player has at least one vacation day left and the game's time control allows to use vacation days.

1.4) Next game selection

When a new move is being performed (while playing a game), BrainKing displays several options where to go after the move is submitted - move and go to the next game, move and go to the main page, etc. This feature makes the playing process easier, especially when a high number of games is started concurrently. Paying members are given one more option which makes the playing experience even more convenient and flexible - a combo box with all next games to play is displayed, so the player can select any particular game (listed with game type and opponent name) to play after submitting the current move.

1.5) Pulldown list of games

Paying members have an advantage of using various dynamic functions, accessing additional data or information which would not normally fit to the page structure. One of the most important features of this type is a pulldown list of games to play, activated when a mouse cursor is moved to the red number next to Main page link at the left menu column. This action instantly shows a list of the player's started games, so the player can easily choose the preferred game to play, no matter which BrainKing page he is currently viewing. The same feature works at the list of online friends at the right column - it shows a list of the player's games started with the particular friend. It is very useful when the player prefers to play games with friends first, without looking for them at the full list of all started games.

2) Game system

Besides the mentioned members only functions and improvements of "head-to-head" play, BrainKing provides many advantages to players with higher membership levels, who want to compete in a larger sense - tournaments, team matches, multi player games etc.

2.1) Number of joined tournaments

A free membership allows a player to join only one tournament and until this tournament is finished, the player cannot sign up for another one.

2.1.1) Brain Bishop and Brain Knight

A player can join 1 tournament of each game type and until the particular tournament is finished, he cannot sign up for another one of the same game type.

2.1.2) Brain Rook

A player can join unlimited number of tournaments.

2.2) Number of joined stairs

A free membership allows a player to join only 1 stairs and if he wants to participate in another one, he must leave the current stairs first (and lose all gained positions).

2.2.1) Brain Bishop and Brain Knight

A player can join up to 7 stairs and if he wants to participate in more, he must leave some current stairs first (and lose all gained positions).

2.2.2) Brain Rook

A player can join unlimited number of stairs.

2.3) Membership in fellowships

Only paying members can join fellowships and take advantage of all their features (internal tournaments, ponds, or stairs, private discussion boards, team challenges etc.). If a player's paid membership expires, he remains a member in all previously joined fellowships but cannot use any fellowship functions, until his membership is renewed.

2.4) Team matches

Fellowship members can form game teams and participate in team matches with teams of other fellowships. Each team has a captain who organizes the team activity - sends match challenges to other captains, accepts/reject incoming match challenges, creates public team challenges etc.

2.5) Team tournaments

Fellowship game teams can sign up for public team tournaments which are regularly created at the Team tournaments page. Teams get Team BKR (based on their match results) and team tournament winners are highlighted at the Winners page.

2.6) Multi player games

Multi player games are designed to accept any number of players who want to participate (unless a limit is set by the particular game parameters). Only paying members can play multi player games.

2.6.1) Run around the pond

Run around the pond is an interesting and funny game with points only (no game pieces), played against all joined opponents at once. It also allows all participants to have a private discussion as a part of the game.

2.6.2) Run in the dark

Run in the dark is a "stealth" variant of the standard Pond game. The important difference is that no player knows which opponents are playing the game with him - they are displayed as ? (question marks) instead of names. The player names are revealed after they fell to the pond because they cannot win the game anymore.

2.6.3) Run in the rain

Run in the rain is the second variant of Run around the pond. It requires a different strategy because of slightly modified rules of "falling".

2.7) BKR charts and inactivity

In order to keep the BKR charts more accurate, all players who don't actively play the particular game anymore are temporarily removed from the charts. The inactivity period is measured by the date and time of the last finished rated game of the corresponding type and it was set to 1 month for non-paying members and 6 months for paying members. This feature simply avoids inactive players with high BKR to occupy the tops of the charts forever.

2.8) BKR graphs

Paying members can see a small graph icon next to a BKR value on many pages (Main page, game pages, Ratings page etc.). Clicking this image will generate and display a graph of BKR history of the selected player and game type, so it can be used to analyze the changes of BKR value since the first finished rated game of this type.

2.9) Tournament creation

Only paying members with Brain Rook or higher membership level can create any number of tournaments with various parameters to set - one or more game types (including a random game selection), time control, accessibility (public or private), tournament type (round robin, single elimination, ...), optional prize for the winner, etc.

2.10) Fellowship creation

Only paying members with Brain Rook or higher membership level can create up to 2 fellowships (Black Brain Rooks are allowed to create up to 3 fellowships). It also enables many consequential features - creating internal fellowship tournaments, ponds or stairs, creating game teams, sending group messages to the fellowship members, creating private discussion boards, participating in team tournaments etc.

2.11) Stairs creation

Only paying members with Brain Rook or higher membership level can create unlimited number of stairs in the fellowships they own (it means that they have the Big Boss rank there). These stairs are accessible to all members of the particular fellowship.

2.12) Game archive download

BrainKing supports an export of selected game types (chess, checkers, backgammon, ...) in text formats (pgn, pdn, mat, ...) which can be imported to many third party applications. Paying members also have an option to download all (or selected) games of the chosen type as a zip archive, containing text files of the particular games.

2.13) Multiple signing up for tournaments, ponds and stairs

A standard way to sign up for a tournament requires to visit the particular tournament page, select the game type and then click the sign-up link. It is not too convenient, especially when the tournament contains many game types and the player is interested in all of them, so he would be forced to make this procedure for every game type one by one. BrainKing allows a player to make a multiple sign-up to all or selected game types of the target tournament by checking corresponding checkboxes next to the game type links and clicking the sign-up button. This action performs all sign-up operations automatically and works for multiple sign-ups for Run around the Pond games and Stairs system as well. Due to restrictions of some membership levels, this feature is available only to players with Brain Rook or higher membership.

3) Community

Although BrainKing had been formerly created as a pure game site, it also contains many features known from social networking projects - discussion boards, chat rooms, friend lists, user profiles, user pictures etc. Many of these functions are available to all registered users, but there are still some extras to be unlocked after upgrading to a higher membership level:

3.1) Moderation of discussion boards

Paying members can become moderators of public or private discussion boards. Board moderators are granted to delete inappropriate posts, ban offending users, change the particular board description, set the board access mode, etc. BrainKing discussion board system allows to define more moderators for the same board, which can cooperate to keep the friendly feeling and proper content of the board.

3.2) Icons

Paying members can upload a small 40x50 picture (which is called icon) to their profiles. Icons are shown next to the player's name on many important pages - game pages, discussion boards, private messages etc.

3.3) Smileys

BrainKing contains more than 400 smileys (small images to express emotions or other actions) which can be used at discussion boards, private messages, in-game messages, user profiles etc. Only paying members are allowed to use smileys, either by their number codes or with a help of an interactive popup window.

3.4) Chat Box

BrainKing Chat Box, displayed at the top of every BrainKing page (if it is turned on), is a great opportunity to send short messages to other players who are using the chat box as well, without a need to interrupt the game playing process. The basic version is available to all registered users, but only paying members have the access to all chat box features, including fast automatic refresh, smiley popup window, many options to set/change etc.

3.5) Context menu

BrainKing Context Menu is a neat way to store and remember the name and address (URL) of any BrainKing page which is not linked directly from menu columns. Paying members have an option to store any number of such links and recall them easily on every BrainKing page either by a right-click or using the Show link at the page top.

3.6) Autosave

The autosave feature, available to paying members only, is a great backup tool to make an automatic copy of a text you are writing (discussion board posts, private messages, profile descriptions etc.) after a defined number of seconds or minutes. If your text is successfully saved (signalized by Autosave OK! message), you can easily restore it later, even if you lost a connection to BrainKing server before submitting it.

3.7) Notepad

BrainKing's Notepad is a page, available to paying members only, which can be used to store private notes of any kind, organized to any number of folders. The Notepad is fully searchable (to locate notes containing specific keywords) and the number of notes is not limited.

3.8) Advertisements

Some BrainKing pages can contain advertisements of different kinds (text links, image banners etc.) which generate an additional income to be used for hardware upgrade, financing of new services development and similar activities. Since paying members are already giving BrainKing their financial support, they have an option (at the Settings page) to turn off all advertisements.

3.9) Keyboard shortcuts

After writing a long message (to be posted to a discussion board or sent to a game opponent), it is not too convenient to look for a mouse, in order to click the Submit button. Paying members have a possibility to activate keyboard shortcuts, which allow them to perform certain mouse actions with the keyboard only - for example Ctrl-Enter key combination submits the text without any mouse clicks, which is a well known feature included in instant messengers.