nabla: I am certainly not a Mancala expert, but the first link I tried, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oware says:

If an opponent's houses are all empty, the current player must make a move that gives the opponent seeds. If no such move is possible, the current player captures all seeds in his/her own territory, ending the game.

nabla: I certainly agree the game is unbalanced. But we have other games with the same problem: Maharajah chess, Horde chess, Pah Tum, Five in Line, etc.

nabla: But Nokia didn't invent the rules themselves either. They just picked a well-known instance [*] of a certain subclass of Mancala games (a class that has been well studied, with many instances known to be a win for white).

[*] The instances vary with the number of pods (6 each in this case), and the number of intial seeds (4 in this case). I think I've posted links to pages about this variant a while ago.

diogenysos: Well, it *should* be a 'disadvantage'. That's the entire point of a rating system; if a higher rated player plays a lower rated player, his expected score is more than 50%. So, if the match ends 1:1, the higher rated player is expected to lose.

Your suggestion could lead to a 2000 rated player playing a 1000 rated player in a 2-game match, where the 2000 rated player winning the first game 26:22, losing the second game 25:23, and still getting his rating adjusted as a win.

That's not to say that I don't think the rating adjustment could not be improved. Currently, the potential of ratings isn't fully taken advantage of. Regardless of the length of a match, for rating adjustment, it's considered a win, a draw, or a loss. But ratings (at least, ELO ratings and their derivatives) predict an outcome. For instance, that the higher rated player ought to win a 10 game match by 7:3. If the higher rated player wins by 6:4, the higher rated player would actually lose points, while the lower rated player wins rating points, despite losing the match (because he did better than he should do according to his ratings).

diogenysos: Winning 28:22 instead of 25:23 doesn't mean you have a better strategy. Mancala isn't about scoring as many points as you can - just more than your opponent. It would make for a totally different game.

I don't think 'counting points' variations work as well for perfect knowledge games like mancala as for games as backgammon where there are unknown factors (die roles for instance).

nabla: I wouldn't say that the rules are wrong for Mancala - if there's anything wrong, it would be the name, as Mancala stands for a large family of 'seeding games'. There are probably as many mancala variants as there are chess variants - although in mancala it's not variants of a specific game.

Given the large number of rules (i.e. different amount of pods, different amount of seeds, different rules for reaping, etc), you cannot call it wrong. Although I don't think anyone has found the exact game whose rules are implemented here on any of the lists of mancala games out there. The closest game I have found is the one that is implemented on Nokia phones, and there you also get the seeds in your own pods if the opponent has no moves left.

I'd say, leave the rules as is (or make them the same as in the Nokia game), and add some other Mancala games where white doesn't have the overwhelming advantage.

The game is a simple win for black, even if you play badly.

I wonder if the game could be spiced up a little, giving white a slightly larger chance to score a win every now and then. My suggestion: white wins if it gives a check, takes an undefended piece, or if the game reaches move 40.

It will still be a win for black though.

volant: You can't copyright games, although you can copyright the description of the rules. And the names of games might be trademarked.

However, I think Fencer has stated he doesn't want to make word games because they will be language dependent. And Brainking is an international site. Of course, he is entitled to change his mind.

harmy: That's why I don't play those games.

ngsinan: Even if you remember cards for only one or two tricks, such a trick may be one or two weeks ago - while you may be playing 20 or 40 games in parallel.

Of course, it's not up to me to decide whether or not bridge should appear. But if it does, I doubt I'll play it. And that counts for most card games - they suffer from a similar problem: you need to be able to remember what cards have appeared. Some possible exceptions:

• Cribbage. Normally if you reach 30 the played cards are set aside, but here they could be shown somewhere on the board. (Cribbage is also a two player game...)
  
• UNO, with an "infinite" deck. (So, if dealing any dealt card has a change of 1/108, 2/108 or 4/108 of appearing)
  </ul>

ngsinan: Well, I like to play bridge, but I don't think I like to play bridge on a turn based site. Games on a turn based site should be those games where the current state gives you all the information necessary to play well. For chess for instance, only the current position matters, not how the position was reached (ok, except for the fact whether you are still allowed to castle, and for the 50 moves rule - but the latter hasn't been implemented). For bridge, it's different. By the time you get to play your 10th card, you might be six weeks away from playing the first card - well, then I won't remember whether you played the Jack or not. Besides, it would suck to be the dummy.

Furthermore, there are no 4 player games implemented here anyway.

joshi tm: Nice idea. Unfortunally, the majority of the games I play are against people who aren't new, and don't have autopass turned on.

Now, I can't prove it, but I think most of them don't have autopass turned on because they either don't know about it, or don't care (and then won't take the trouble to turn it on).

Oh well. I recently played my first game where autopass was actually used. (And I now have a couple of games that drag on because I have a pass and I'm not passing until the game is about to time out - if my opponent doesn't want autopass, he'll just have to live with loooooooooooooooong games)

nabla: Not just for color-blind people. While (for a non color-blind person like me) it's easy to see the difference between one, two or three beads, it gets progressively harder. When it exceeds five, I have to carefully count. And when there are more than 16 beads in one hole, you just get an image of 16 beads.

BIG BAD WOLF: We're talking about text here - page size isn't significant here. You won't note the difference between a few letters more. Rendering the page however may show a difference - and that's what you can surpress with display: none.

As for the size of the the CSS file, two things. First, having ids and/or classes for all elements doesn't mean the CSS file should have an entry for each id or class. Second, a CSS file is rather static - the CSS file typically doesn't change between page requests. Which means the browser only has to check the CSS file hasn't changed, and doesn't have to download it.

As for the server side calculations needed to generate a page, I have no idea how much is calculated on the fly, and how much is pre-calculated.

BIG BAD WOLF: Yes, I'd like to have smaller pages as well. I started my CSS file with the one posted here offering the classic look, and most of what I have added since is { display: none }. Unfortunally, most classes are very generic and labelled for the visual effect (like 'to-right') instead of what it is ('user icon', 'user last move', etc). And many things are quite hard to select (due to their encapsulating element either not having a class or an id, or having a class or id that is used elsewhere as well).

redfrog: Rapid Logik? Most of my Logik games don't see a move 7; isn't that rapid enough? (However, it still needs as many clicks as your average Anti-Backgammon game...;-))

Fencer: Nothing but the submit button! The board is important, the submit button is. *Most* moves aren't send with a message, and if you're going to take the time to type in a message, an extra scroll is relatively not much extra time.

grenv: No. I was discussing the case where the winner will be determined on SB points (the case of a sole winner I have already described - that's both trivial and efficient). For SB points, all games in the tournament are relevant, even of players that have no chance of winning. (Ok, ok, if there are two players A and B that have the most points (and hence their scores are tied) and there are players C and D that both won all their games against A and B, the outcome of the games between C and D doesn't matter for the SB points of A and B).

Remember that the SB of a player i equals Σ s_j P_j, (summing over all opponents j), with s_j the score i got in his game(s) against j, and P_j the total number of points j got.

mctrivia: That's basically what I said. However, that doesn't take SB into account - which is what nabla wants.

I don't know of an efficient algorithm that will determine whether there's a winner, even if the winner has to be decided on SB points. Sure, trying all outcomes of a match may work, but that's a lot of combinations. Take for instance a tournament with 6 players, every one playing two games against each other. All games are finished, except for one player, he hasn't finished any game yet. Then there are 7,776 different ways of the 10 games to finish (well, 59,049, but you don't have to consider player A winning one game and losing the other game against player B separately). In a group of 8, there would be 279,936 possibilities (4,782,969 without eliminating symmetries).

nabla: It's not that hard to write an algorithm that can determine the winner regardless of the outcome of the outstanding matches most of the time isn't too hard:

For each player i, let W_i the number of wins he has, D_i the number of draws, and U_i the number of undecided games. There is a winner if there is an i such that W_i + D_i / 2 > W_j + D_j/2 + U_j, for all j != i. This is trivial to calculate. The only winners you might miss are the winners who finish with the same amount of points as other players, but win on SB.

CryingLoser: The problem is that there are so many exceptions that it would be impossible to implement. For instance, a Dice Chess game can be over in 4 moves, but it can also last for 50 moves. The suggested system would penalize someone because in his games, the games last for 50 moves (which he actually may play quite fast), while the other games were all finished in 4 moves (played quite slow).

Or someone might be away on a three week vacation; the tournament he signed up for started three weeks early because it reached the required number of players, and all the other games were finished before the player returns from vacation.

Furthermore, any game is played by two people. No tournament can depend on just one player to finish his/her games.

pauloaguia: I've yet to see anyone stating they don't want their opponent to use autopass in a Fisher game because they want to win by time-out, but suppose there's a vast silent group of players wanting to win their games this way. I have the following suggestions:

• In a Fisher game, an autopassed move doesn't add any time to the clock of the player who autopasses.
  
• Autopassed moves are queued until the autopassing player comes unline. Only then are the autopassed moves played. Heck, there could even be a big red button on the main page saying "PRESS HERE TO PLAY ALL YOUR AUTOPASSED MOVES". Disadvantage is that the opponent of the autopassing player still has to wait.
  </ul>
  
  Anyway, starting today, I will not play a pass until I've less than 24 hours left on my clock.

pauloaguia: I wonder, are there any stats of how many people have autopass turned on vs how people who haven't?

Given that the default is autopass off, I'm afraid only a handful of people have turned it on.

grenv: Firefox works well on Linux, yeah, but not on every Linux. I've tried installing Firefox on the box I'm using as a workstation, but Firefox hasn't been written with backwards compatability in mind, and it doesn't run if it can't find the versions of the libraries it wants.

And no, my box runs too many things to risk updating the libraries for a mere browser.

And beside that, I use certain little things often enough on my Mozilla that don't work, or don't work the same way as in Firefox. Little things, but often enough to not even want to use Firefox.

pauloaguia: I don't use Windows, so no IE either.

pauloaguia: There are 2 problems with that: 1) I use neither Opera nor Firefox. 2) You will have to redo the work each time Fencer changes the style sheet, or at least does something to the side that requires style sheet changes.

BIG BAD WOLF: It would be nice if everyone could add their own CSS (which shouldn't be too hard to program as CSS cascades, so it would just be a matter of pasting something in the database to each page - or solve it with a link). For instance, the pages I've seen so far aren't that bad - except that I don't like the white background. It gives too much constrast and that tires my eyes much faster than pages with less constrast do. So if I could just inject some CSS to make the background a light grey (or light brown or light pink), I'd be happy. Fencer wouldn't need to review it, and it wouldn't look 'ugly' on someone elses screen. Others might prefer larger fonts or different colours to give them better contrast (or suffer from some form of colour blindness).

Of course, that still doesn't prevent people writing style sheets with complete different themes.

And hopefully, the site will still be useable if someone has stylesheets turned off for whatever reason.

Hrqls: So, if I play a handful of games, and only log on once a forthnight and then play a move in each of the games in which it's my turn, your system would consider me a very fast player.

I doubt that people looking for fast opponents want to play me though.

mctrivia: I don't agree your second point. If I come to this site once a day, and play a move in all my games, then that will be rate of play, regardless of the time constraint of the games. I won't play faster in a tournament that has a 3 day move limit that I play in a tournament that has a 7 day move limit. I'd still be playing 1 move/game/day.

pgt: The problem (as I see it) with your proposal is that it doesn't just measure the speed of the player, it also measures the speed of the opponents of the player. With your proposal, a slow player that plays mostly against slow players will still be able to collect "fast player points" - his opponents aren't fast so it's easier to be below the 10% margin. A player who plays against fast opponents has to work a lot harder to get below the 10% margin.

I think it's the intention of your proposal that the second player gets ranked "faster" than the first.

gogul: Ok, if you believe a fair stat is possible, I like to see how you would do it.

And I'm very curious why you believe it doesn't matter for the number of moves you can make per day/per game whether you're in the same time-zone as your opponent or 9 hours ahead.

gogul: Well, if you agree that the proposed "how fast does one play" statistics can lead to false conclusions, than you must agree with me that "if there would be a 'move speed rating' as a further setting for tounaments" it would lead to the same wrong conclusions as well. People would be banned from tournaments because they recently played a lot of games againt people in just the wrong timezone. Or people might get frustrated that their tournament isn't fast because it has a mixture of of players from different timezone while the statistics weren't based on that. Or someone might change playing styles for whatever reason.

If you want a tournament with fast play, create one and use whatever time parameters you find acceptable. Don't allow or disallow people to enter because of some statistic that doesn't mean anything.

pauloaguia: Not to mention that such a statistic doesn't mean much. Suppose I have 35 games going on, in 34 I move once a month, but in the other I move 30 times a day (perhaps because it's against a fast player in the same time-zone, or due to autopass, or because that's a simple game and the others aren't). My average would be more than one move/game/day. But would you want to pick me if you're looking for a fast game?

jurek: The majority of the people here are from either the US or Europe. Yes, it benefits Europeans playing against Japanese people as well. And yes, there are exceptions of Americans playing very late against Europeans playing early. Although, they still both get punished as they will have little overlap in their playing times, and will only be able to play a move/day, although they are fast players.

gogul: The disadvantage of that is that it makes European players appear to be slower movers. In matches of a European player vs an American, it will usually be the American player moves makes the "last move of the day", just because Americans trail Europeans in time. The European is then punished for the fact there's more time for him to wake up again, as there is for the American to wake up after the European.

I don't see the added value of this statistic - and I think it can lead to false interpretations.

mctrivia: I'd say that if you have little time left and you are playing a Fisher game without getting bonus time on each move (otherwise, there's no problem at all), I'd say getting the game back immediately is a benefit. Otherwise you might visit another game or log off or do something else, and lose valuable time (and possibly the game) if your opponent moves when you're not ready to play your next move.

What I don't understand is why the anti-automove people make such a big deal out of it. Most of the time, there's no forced pass anyway. It only effects a relative small number of moves.

I wonder if the following compromise could work:

• Autopass is a player attribute - anyone can determine whether he/she uses autopass, regardless of the preference of the opponent.
  
• By default, if a move can be autopassed, and if the player is online, the autopass is effective immediately. Otherwise, the pass is queued until the player online again. As soon as the player is online again, his/her queued autopasses are being played.
  
• People can set an "play opponents autopasses immediately" setting. If set, and if the opponent uses autopass, and if the opponent must pass, the pass is played immediately, even if the opponent is offline.
  </ul>
  
  This would allow Fencer to go to bed, knowing the autopasses of Big Bad Wolf won't come back to him until BBW is online again. It also allows people trying to win games on the clock to keep trying to win this way. And McTrivia doesn't have to wait for me to log again to move again in a game where I have to pass.

mctrivia: Point three is equivalent with Fencers implementation.

pauloaguia: I find AutoVac much more intrusive in a game (since my opponent won't timeout when expected and a game may go well beyond the time I intended it to in the begining)

While I agree with the points being made regarding autopass, I don't quite agree with the point quoted. Even if your opponent doesn't use auto-vacation, he can still set vacation days after the game starts (and if he doesn't use auto-vacation, and will be on vacation, he's likely to do so).

IMO, vacation plays a role in how long a game lasts, but much less so as the average amount of moves we manage to make in a day - and the latter is depending on many factors, one of which is the timezones the players are in.

Fencer: The opponent could object if he doesn't want to play with autopass at all.

Yes...., but is that a reasonable objection? Say I would use an automatic system to pass for me (be it autopass or a script that I've running on my computer) would the playing experience for my opponent be any different as from me just moving quickly? If the objection is that "but with autopass, the games come right back at me", I'm happy with autopass giving my opponent to option of having a delay. (That is, players can choose that if their opponent uses autopass, the automove happens after 5 minutes).

mctrivia: Is priority 0 the highest, or the lowest priority?

Fencer: Well, I have the settings to have the move button directly below the game board, except the thing isn't.

There's the game board, then the name of the game (in big letters), the name of the opponent with all his icons, the time of his last move, my name, the time of my last move, the offer draw tick box, a message box (which I never use) to leave a message for my opponent - with caption, a message box (which I also never use) to leave myself a note - again with caption, and only then, a full screen size later, is the move button.

I hate to think where that move button is if I untick the "show move button right below game board" box.

BIG BAD WOLF: Legan is an example of having both a special setup, and special rules: the pawns move diagonal and hit straigth (somewhat like Berolina, except that there's no choice in direction). And the pawns don't promote anywhere.

But I like the basic idea of your suggestion.

You could go even further:
- pick a board size (no reason to limit it to the 6x6 .. 10x10 we have now)
- pick a set of pieces to play with (standard pieces, janus, amazon, archbischop, marshall, grasshopper, nightrider, etc (lots of pieces to pick from at chessvariants)
- pick a setup (standard, legan, fortress, legan, screen, crazy screen)
- pick zero or more additional rules (loop, recycle, cylinder, berolina, dice, ice-age, dark, atomic, anti, 3-checks, etc)


So, wanna play anti-atomic-ice-age-dark-cylinder-dice chess on a 13x7 board, using 10 janusses each?

Harassed: 1) is long overdue. It makes Backgammon Race, Crowded Backgammon and Cloning Backgammon much harder to play then necessary. 3) would be nice, and the other features I'd never use.

BIG BAD WOLF: Yeah, I noticed that too, and I was planning to ask for this as well.

MadMonkey: There's already such an 'undo': it's called 'back'.

pauloaguia: I second that request. I would like the see the board clickable (each empty square that is), and a tick box next to it. Tick the box for a guess, untick (the default) for a shoot. Click the board for your shot or guess. Then you can make a move with just one round-trip (and usually just one mouse action).

MadMonkey: It doesn't matter. Fencer likes it the way it is and isn't going to change it. Oh well.

Fencer: Because it's less confusing. With the table as it is, and the dice under the table, I can't see the dice and the names above the table. If my score was always displayed on the right (or always on the left), I can easier see what my score is (because it's always on the same side).

Let me ask you this, what's the advantage of half of your games having your score on the right, and half of the games having your score on the left?

One's table in Dice Poker is sometimes on the right, and sometimes on the left. My guess is that whether it's on the left or right is determined whether you have 'white' or 'black'. I would like the position where one's table is to be fixed, that is, regardless of your colour your own table is always on the right (or always on the left). Just like in chess games, regardless whether you have black or white, you always play from bottom to top, and with backgammon you always play from upper-right to lower-right. Could the display of Dice Poker (and Triple Dice Poker) be made such that your table is always on the same side?

dresali: Sorry, but I don't buy that (the swap rule). Take for instance the following game: On a board with 4 squares, white and black put a marker on a square on each turn. The first person that cannot place a marker loses the game. Obviously, going last is a huge advantage. How's a swap rule going to solve the imbalance?