vchess.club : play chess variants

I'm developing a website dedicated to chess variants : vchess.club/ , but with several differences (compared to lichess and others) which makes it unique and not concurrencing any other website :
- all games start with assymetric Fischer Random position
- there is no rating (in fact no identities), no clock

You can play here two original variants :
- Checkered chess, where captures give birth to a piece belonging to both players (thus "checkered")
- Zen chess, where captures are inversed (a bishop on b5 captures a rook on b3)
See the demo video : vchess.club/demo.webm

The design is very minimal (I'm not a designer, but I'll do my best to improve this point of course :) ), and the website is an ultra-simplified of what could be expected of a chess-playing website. Anyway, it's playable, so feel free to use it. Thanks for reading !

Looks interesting :)

I played a quick game. Pgn/fen maybe would be nice, and perhaps an option for Fischerclock.

Thanks for your reply !
Why would we need a FEN or PGN output ?
About the clock yes, I'll think about it because timed games are nice too :)

Cool idea! Not a bad implementation either, at first look. I'd be proud of this.

Thanks! :)
Full implementation here in case of: github.com/yagu0/vchess - open to contributions!

Hey, i still really enjoy your site!
Pgn is nice so i can save my games and try to learn from them. Fischerdoublerandom is good since thats where i have the most troubles.

About the Fischertime, would be nice if you have the option to play on if time runs out, perhaps with the option of claiming a win.

I really like to see some people online :), maybe its an idea to play computer (which is btw not very strong no?) and see number of people in lobby.

The bot couldn't be weaker indeed, it's a depth 2 min-max algorithm :) I tried alpha-beta depth 4, it was quite slow, and even depth 3 was slow for checkered (because variants code is highly not optimized: this wasn't my concern). Note that I force a 500ms delay before the bot play, to make it more "human".

But computer mode's purpose is to learn the rules, not be challenging. Humans are supposed to be challenging :) ...but yes only if they are online.

About claiming a win, the spirit of my website is that winnng or losing doesn't matter much, as long as you enjoy the game. That's why I'd rather not have records of stats against every player, as we have on lichess. This implies that if your opponent is taking too much time you can either resign or leave (as you can do on lichess in casual "long" games > 10min); or start playing against someone else.

PGN is a good idea, and quite easy to implement. I'll do that right after I solve the socket issue (moves not received on some smartphones :/ )

Thanks again for your suggestions and enthusiasm :)

So did you solve the sokcet issue? I noticed when playing bot it searches for human :) even though its not completely what i meant. (when sais 'waiting for opponent..' an option to play bot meanwile maybe)

For the highlights id prefer some more subtle colors, but yes what i really enjoy is the spirit of the site!

maybe have a tournament sometime? i especially enjoy the assymetric960!

"So did you solve the sokcet issue?" : Yes. Smartphones for example can now remain idle, and still receive moves.

I also improved experience when searching games / playing bot : the buttons' background indicate the current state.

So I'm on the way to store a moves list and output a PGN :) in fact it's the very next step.

However, tournaments are not on the roadmap: for competition we already have lichess & cie.