or2ak.com: What should happen to a 4 player chess game if one player times out (or resigns)?

Many multiplayer games don't work well on turn based sites because there's no good way of solving timeouts/resigns.

puupia: Have you played it? Is it playable? How would you present the 3-D game on a 2-D medium?

In the new checkers variants, captured stones remain on the board until you've hit "move". This is according to the rules, but it still startles me each time it happens to me (probably because it doesn't happen in regular Checkers).

Would it be possible to mark captured, but not removed checkers? For instance, with a red (or some other distinctive colour) around the stone, just as we have blue squares indicating the start and end square of the moving piece.

coan.net: While I agree that a new setup of the boards is something to desire, I don't think your suggestion makes sense. In fact, I rather prefer the current setup over your suggestion.

IMO, related games ought to share a board, games that are not, or just vaguely related should not share boards.

Your suggestion splits a large class of related games (checkers) into 2, purely based on board size, and adds in totally unrelated games (breakthrough/halma).

If I were to split up the boards, I'd give the checkers variants the following boards:

1. Checkers


2. International Checkers, Czech Checkers, Russian Checkers, Canadian Checkers, Thai Checkers, Brazilian Checkers (they all have related rules, and have queens, not kings)


3. Gothic Checkers, Turkish Checkers (checkers variants that use all the squares on the board)


4. Anti Checkers, Corner Checkers, One Way Checkers, Parachute Checkers (variants)


5. Alquerque, Hawaiian Checkers (very different rules than checkers; perhaps Hawaiian Checkers shouldn't even be listed as a Checkers variant)

If traffic is low enough, one might want to combine boards 3 & 4, and maybe 1 & 2.

Fencer: I'm willing to test, although I won't claim I know all the little details of the rules. But I can list the significant rules that are different from other versions of checkers:

1. Capturing an enemy piece is mandatory.


2. If there is more than one way to capture enemy pieces, you have to make the move that takes the most pieces.


3. Regular pieces can capture backwards as well.


4. A normal piece reaching the last line promotes to a queen.


5. Unlike Czech Checkers, if a capuring piece reaches the last line, and it can continue capturing (with a backwards move), the move doesn't end - the piece makes the backwards capture and doesn't promote to a queen.


6. If you cannot make a move, you lose (it's not a stalemate).


7. You cannot jump over the same piece twice.


8. Captured pieces remain on the board until the move finishes.


9. Play is done on a 10x10 board.

Fencer: Yes, but you cannot jump the same checker twice.

Fencer: Yeah, but you'd need to work on the backgammon graphics anyway, to be able to distinguish between "race" and "normal" stones on the bar. (The latter are required to be played before you can move any non-barred stones, the former don't. "Race" checkers appear in Crowded Backgammon, Backgammon Race, and Cloning Backgammon). ;-)

If you're playing a multi-point match, there's a table with previous results. It will say things like 'resigned', 'time-out', etc. For gammon games, if the game ended naturally, it will say "All pieces out.", regardless whether the game was won with a (back)gammon or not, or the current value of the cube. It would be interesting to see this information; so I suggest that wording for cubed games be changed into "Backgammon", "Gammon", "All pieces out", or "Double rejected" for backgammon, gammon, 'regular' wins or rejected doubles; in all cases followed by number of points scored (or the value of the cube - given one, the other can be infered). So "Gammon (4)" means that the winner won by gammon, after the cube was doubled.

Eriisa: I guess that's possible (although with my style sheet, there's not input field for notes...), but it still remains awkward. You still have to map the coordinates to the screen. Possible - but playing a game of chess with just the board and the list of moves is possible as well.

The link to "go to next Frog game" is not there if use the "lightweight" settings.

If you guess right in Frog (Finder|Legs), a frog is revealed. However, if you guess wrong, the square remains the same, and you can even guess it again. But the fact that the square doesn't contain a frog is important information (specially in Frog Legs) - having this information burried in the move list is awkward. If the game progresses at one move a week, it's hard to remember which games you have to scan the move list. Also, but this is a minor issue, the fact that a wrongly guessed square can be guessed again, this allows for a never ending game. (It may be possible that there are Frog Legs situations where it's "better" to guess a square of which you know there isn't a frog, than to make a move that reveals information).

So, I propose the following: if a square has been guessed, but doesn't contain a frog, the square is marked (perhaps with a cross, or a question mark), and cannot be guessed again. It still may be shot at (and then revealing the number of frogs surrounding it). This doesn't change the rules of the game (other than preventing guessing the same square twice - but that usually will not be what the player wants anyway), but makes it better playable.

Gammonator: There's a brief explaination what the new combinations are on: http://brainking.com/en/SelectGameType?p=10

Fencer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye_%28sports%29 and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-elimination_tournament

Puckish: Easy. 13 players. First round, 3 players get byes. The remaining 10 play 5 games, giving 5 winners. Second round has the 3 players with byes, and the 5 winners, giving us 8 players, 4 matches, 4 winners. Third round, 4 winners from round 2, 2 matches, 2 winners. Fourth and final round has the two winners from the third round battling it out.

MadMonkey: Good suggestion. It has been proposed before, and I still like it. But instead of giving byes random, I suggest doing the byes randomly only if the tournament is selected to not sort by rating. For tournaments which sort by rating, byes should go to the highest ranked players (just like it would happen in tennis or chess). So, if you have 13 players in a 16 game elimination tournament, the top 3 rated players would get byes.

And, once you have a system of byes, it should be easy to make setting the number of players for elimination tournaments optional (just as regular tournaments have optional lower and upper limits). You could make an elimination tournament with no set number of players. If at the deadline, there are 27 players signed up, you'll have a 5 round tournament, with 5 byes in the first round. If only 12 people signed up, you'll have a 4 round tournament, with 4 byes in the first round.

nabla: in chess, what about the player who offers draw in a winning position in order to ensure the match win?

Then he wins the match with a slightly worse adjustment to his/her rating. So what? Ratings are just a measurement of your performance - they aren't the goal.

All the interest of cubed backgammon matches comes from maximizing one's chance to win the whole match, while not caring about what the exact score will be.

Yes, that's a difference between *gammon and most other games. A single chess game will always divide a single point between the two players. And typically, chess players are more interested in winning the overal match than in the difference - that's why chess matches seldomly continue if the winner has been decided. A "12 game" match maybe over after 10 games, ending in a 6.5 - 3.5 score. Which is clearly a better result than 6.5 - 5.5.

nabla: Measuring activity is not easy to do. A Glicko system is better than an ELO system, but both Glicko and ELO assume matches are almost "instantaneous". That's not true for BK. Someone can be quite active (that is, making lots and lots of moves), but lose "activity" (increasing the RD value in Glicko, or disappearing from the rating lists in the current system) because his games are finished yet. In theory, it's even possible for someone finishing just 2 games a year to remain in the rating list, while someone who plays 500 of them each year disappears for months, just because all his games finish in November.

Having said that, Glicko would be an improvement over the current rating system. Its activity measure isn't perfect for a site like BK, but much better than we have now. And any rating system worth its salt should not consider a match won 6-4 to be equivalent to a match won 10-0. (In proper ELO, someone winning a 10 game match 6-4 may lose rating points (the rating difference gives an expectation of what the final score of a match should be; if you do better, you win points, if you do worse, you lose, regardless of the final score)).

CryingLoser: Being able to challenge the top position, isn't this what ladders are all about?

Rating lists are just what they are: rating lists. They aren't ladders. We already have ladders. And note that currently, someone cannot hold on to the top position without playing forever - if you haven't finished a game in N months (N == 6 for rooks, less for lower ranks), you disappear from the rating list.

Would it be possible to have "autopass" tournaments? What I mean by that is, if you create a (gammon) tournament, you not only get set the time controls, scoring method and number of participants, there's also a tick box that, if selected, means all the games are played with autopass enabled.

This allows autopass lovers to play in tournaments knowing all their games will be autopassed, and those who don't want to play with autopass select another tournament to play.

currylms: In my notes, I use 2 letter abbreviations for colours. If Gray is replaced with Green, I'll have to replace all "Gr"s with "Gr". ;-)

AbigailII: Of course, if brainking were a graphics heavy site, it could benefit from having the images served from elsewhere. But I don't get the impression the graphics takes that much traffic wise.

Fencer: Well, the way to do it is to have a master and one of more slaves. Read access can be done from any slave (or even the master), updates go to the master. So, someone reading the boards would only query a slave, and only if you post something, you need access to the master.

But this really only works if it's ok to get data that is a little out of date - which isn't the case for BrainKing. You certainly don't want to go to a particular game and get the position after the penultimate move. So you want your slaves to be "close", which either means decidated high-speed lines (unlikely to be affordable for BrainKing), or having the slaves on-site. But, if it's the Internet that is the problem, having slaves on-site isn't going to solve anything.

I work for a company that makes its business on the web as well. We're much bigger than BrainKing. The only way we can deal with the massive amount of traffic is to make use of hundreds of database slaves. But they are all on-site. The network has never been a bottleneck - the database is.

MadMonkey: I rather have some other Mancala games that are more balanced. There are hundreds of mancala variants (which, unlike the hundreds of chess variants that were invented just for the sake of inventing a chess variant, are played regularly) many of them not giving a strong advantage to any side.

Fencer: All I see on the settings page are options to position banner ads. However, the poker add seems to be text only. I'm not getting any banner ads, but the poker ad shows up on 'http://brainking.com/en/Tournaments'.

It would be nice if the 'Tournaments' page has selection options for time controls: a field to set the minimum time/move, a field to set the maximum time/move, and tick boxes whether or not to include tournaments that use the Fisher clock, or have restricted vacations.

That way, someone looking for a tournament with fast moves doesn't have to weed through tournaments with long time controls, and vica versa.

mctrivia: Sure, it you present it this way, it looks like a lot. But find me a person who has 1000 games where it is both his turn, and where his opponent has left a message. Then calculate how much data is downloaded if you refresh his main page 1000 times, and compare that to the 71 Mb.

mctrivia: Fencer isn't using title attribute, nor grabbing an image from a subdirectory for the "opponent is online" mark; so there's no reason to assume he'll do otherwise for an "opponent left message" mark. But even if he's using 71 bytes for a mark, so what?

In an age where people download entire Dvds, and use graphics where a simple ':)' could do, who cares about 71 bytes, even if it's repeated a hundred or even a thousand times?

mctrivia: I just went to a profile of someone with 1700 games - the page showing his games is currently 552kb large. An image tag of <img src="/images/dot.gif"> clocks in at 27 bytes. Even if said person would have half of his games with a message left by his opponent (which seems quite unlikely, he would have to have multiple conversations going on with the same person), the pagesize would increase to 575kb. Big deal. An increase of about 23 kb, slightly more than the size of the dragon image, and significantly less than the latest smiley added.

But I wouldn't like the lone '*', as it cannot be surpressed with a style sheet. <span class = 'message-indicator'>*</span> could handle that, but then you might as well use an image.

coan.net: It already has to access the database to show the gametype, eventname, opponent, your colour, the current move number, and time left. Surely you'd think Fencer is able to change the SQL in such away that it doesn't require more accesses to the database (although he might need another join depending on how the database is set up)?

Beside, Fencer's objection was huge amount of data to transfer to the browser, not "more accesses to the database".

mctrivia: Unless Fencer makes a different image for each game, or if you have a really stupid browser, adding an image a 1000 times to a page will only count for one download of the image. Which, after the first time, will be in cache anyway.

Noone complains about the overhead of the image marking online players - yet that suffers from the same "problem". Heck, if one would use the same image as for online players, the only increase in traffic would be the extra 'IMG' tags in the HTML page.

Furthermore, a single simple image is a huge traffic problem, smilies should be abandoned. The images are much larger, and what's worse, a typical boards page has many different smilies. But no, there are no complains about traffic if someone makes a 35k smiley; instead, it is welcomed and added to the collection.

Now, as I said, I'm not interested at all in such an image (not caring about in-game chats - the medium is too awkward and slow), but I don't buy the 'traffic' argument.

Fencer: But imagine the huge amount of data to transfer to the browser if someone starts 1000 games and only a half of them contains a last move message.

Really? The extra amount of traffic would be a single image (which typically will be in the browsers cache anyway), and 500 times an 'IMG' tag in the HTML code. Surely it wouldn't take more traffic than if half of the games where played against opponents that are online?

Personally, I don't care for such an image, and I would use my style sheet to filter it out, but I find the extra traffic argument baffling.

dicepro: IMO, perfect information isn't a necessity for a game to work well on a turn-based site. The various boat games, Logic and Frog Finder are examples of games without perfect information that work well. Also, games involving dice don't have perfect information - but they work well.

What, IMO, is a necessity is that the history of the game isn't important. That is, all you need to decide on the best move is the current situation on the board, regardless of how it has been archieved. This is why, IMO, most card games are unsuitable for turn-based sites. (And that's why I don't like to play Dark chess or Espionage on a turn based site).

dicepro: So, if I play chess against someone who's stronger than me, and he offers the cube on his first move, I ought to refuse right away, so the game is over before a piece has actually moved?

That doesn't make any sense.

dicepro: The doubling cube is an integral part of backgammon - multipoint matches are required there to eliminate the luck factor. And, quite importantly, backgammon doesn't have a draw. Furthermore, a backgammon game counts for 1, 2 or 3 points depending on the board situation when the game ends.

This is not the situation with most other games (except for the "draws are not possible" in some games). A doubling cube just doesn't make sense for the other games.

There are many things that could be implemented to speed up games: autopass and autoplay (and then implemented in a useful way, not as done currently), and public shaming of people who play on (delaying their moves consistently till a few hours before their time runs out) in a hopelessly lost situation.

TarantinoFan: I use a style sheet option to turn that off. div#status-fellows-section {display: none} turns it off for me. (Although I don't have a friends list, and I'm not a member of a fellowship, so you may have to twiddle it for you to work).

Vikings: Timed out player CANNOT win a round. The rules forbid that explicitely.

Fencer: If I were to implement a multi-player game like the proposed Strategy War, I would allow any time control that's now possible with regular games. Which means that if a turn starts, the clock of all players start to run. If a player moves, his/her clock stops. If all players have played their move, the moves become visible for the other players, the system resolves the moves (count scores, etc), and the next turn starts (all the clocks of the players run again). That means if the time control is five days/move, but all players have made their move on the second day, the next move starts on the second day. This still allows the possibility for weekends, vacation days, and even a Fisher clock. I would not allow a player who has timed out to get back in the game - once (s)he has timed out, (s)he's supposed to be out of the game. For strategy wars, the system makes the rest of the moves for the player. In a game like 10000, I'd let the system make non-scoring moves for timed out players. For say, multi-player Ludo, I'd remove a timed out player.

This doesn't answer the question "What to do with players resigning?".

coan.net: I'd be really disappointed if, in the case Brainking would get multiplayer games, the games were implemented as ponds currently: having to make a move once every 24 hours. Unless it would be games that are over in less than five moves, I'd never play such a game.

Czuch: In Strategy War, all players should move simultaneously, so the game *COULD* be implemented in such a way that moves can be made simultaneously as well. Note that I say could - in logic moves are (from a game mechanics point of view) simultaneously as well, but it's implemented sequential. The suggested 10,000 game could easily be played with each player moving at the same time as well (which would any advantage a player has based on turn order). So, if the game would be implemented, then it could be implemented in such a way all players moved in parallel. Then again, Dice Poker, Triple Dice and the battleboats variants could have been implemented in such a way that players moved in parallel, but their moves are sequential as well (giving the second player a tiny advantage).

As for flipping cards at random in 'strategy war'; that wouldn't be much of a game. There's no decision to be made by the player - the entire game could be played by the computer (tournaments would be decided seconds after they start).

Remains what to do with players timing out. It was suggested that in strategy war, a random move would be played. But what to do on the next turn? Can the player come back in? If you allow the player to get back in, it means that if the player doesn't come back, each move will have to wait for a timeout. Which means that some games could take a long time. It's probably better to say that if you timeout on one move, the the rest of the game, the system will play a random card. For 10000 I suggest that a player that has timed out is supposed to be making non-scoring moves for the remainder of the game.

jessica: Why would have to know anything about soccer to play this game?

rednaz23: Would it be possible to show what languages each person speaks in their profile by having the representing flag of a language for each country shown?

That's a nice hornets nest, associating languages with country flags. Take for instance 'English', whose flag would you want to use for that? Insult the Brits by using the US flag? Annoy the Welsh by using the Union Jack? Confuse most people by using the English flag? The Canadian flag is out, because that might mean the person speaks French. Australian flag perhaps? And what about French? The flag of France? Belgium? Switzerland? Monaco?

Only a few languages have flags, Esperanto for instance. And then there are languages that are not an official language of any country.

You're better off to use the ISO standard for languages.

joshi tm: Not allowing players to resign is silly. What point does it serve? Sure, if I resign in a gammon position while I could have played on and lose for one point, I'd help my opponent. But if I play chess and I let my opponent take my queen, I'm helping him as well. And if I play bad moves in backgammon, I help my opponent as well. Do you want to forbid that as well? Besides, what is the penalty of resigning going to be? What happens if the person who is not allowed to resign simply won't move in the game anymore? Or worse, starts moving just before timeout, dragging the game on forever? That hurts everyone, delaying the finish of the tournament.

mctrivia: How about "move to random game", "move to game closest to victory", "move to games with least amount of pieces on the board", "move to game with opponent with shortest name", ... ? ;-)

emmett: Scrabble is not a strategy game.

It's not? As opposed to, oh, say, Behemoth Chess? Or Maharajah Chess? Or Dice Poker? Or Ludo? IMO, there's more strategy in Scrabble than in many of the games currently being offered on Brainking.

But even if some game wasn't a strategy game, so what? If you only want to play strategy games, and you think certain games aren't, then don't play them.

As for pogo.com, I haven't seen it. But I can't make heads nor tails from your argument. Even if there would be a connection between dice-loving Americans and advertisements (which I doubt there is), I'd like to stress out that the game of Scrabble doesn't involve dice. Unlike the game you have played most on Brainking, Dice Chess.

emmett: I hope we leave scrabble out of this site.

I don't understand this sentiment. It's one thing to not like to play Scrabble for whatever reason (for instance, because you don't like the game, because you only speak Tiki-tiki and you can't play it in Tiki-tiki, because you're afraid your opponent uses a dictionary, whatever). But then you can just decide to not play Scrabble. Noone will force you.

But I don't understand why you'd hope this game will never appear on Brainking.

MadMonkey: Scrabble is *much* more than just knowing which words you can play. At best a dictionary can give you is a list of possible words to play. (Which, assuming the game is implemented in such a way that invalid words are rejected, can be gotten from the system as well, with some patience). A dictionary doesn't give a suggestion what a good move is. Unlike, say, a chess or backgammon program.

nodnarbo: but scrabble would be difficult because of different languages and dictionaries

Why? Technically, it isn't that difficult, most of the code will be language independent. The language stuff will be just a dictionary, and a mapping of letters to frequences and points. There may be some tricky policy decisions, for instance whether you're going to consider scrabble in language X a different variant from scrabble in language Y or not (and hence have separate ratings and tournaments), or whether the language played is like the number of points to play to in a backgammon match (which is all lumped together in ratings).

That is, if you are going to make scrabble versions for all languages. But many languages only have a handful of active people. One could just recognize that English is the most wildly used language here (by a large margin) and just offer scrabble (or a similar game) in English. And yes, it would be unfair for the person who only speaks Tiki-Tiki, he wouldn't be able to play. But he won't be able to play if the game isn't there, so it's hardly a loss.

pauloaguia: I tried to sign up, but failed. I didn't bother to try again. It's weird enough that a blog with important information about this site is on a different site, but if we also have to discuss it on a different site, it's even weirder. I fail to see what the advantage is; perhaps there's a hidden one for Fencer, but there's none for the user.

pauloaguia: You could just set it up such that you get notifications for all your games, and have your mail or RSS client filter out all games you aren't interested in. ;-)

MadMonkey: If you are using style sheets, you can do something like:

b + a[href="Tournaments?tri=206948#1"] {       
    position: absolute; top: 0px; left: 200px;
    height: 30px; width: 250px; background: yellow 
}    

Which puts a large yellow bar on the top of the page with a link to the tournament. Unfortunally, you'd need have to list each tournament separately.

Butt ugly, but at least I won't make a costly mistake.

nabla: The quote says that you only get the seeds in your own pods if you cannot make a move that gives your opponent a move to make. For instance, all you have (as white) is 3 seeds in a1 and 2 seeds in b1. No possible move will give your opponent a seed.

Note that Oware is quite different from the Mancale game we play here. Oware doesn't have a collection pod, you can only score seeds with captures, which you do by ending your sow in an opponents pod that contains 2 or 3 stones (after seeding).

Another Oware link