BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

There was nothing new in this category for a long time, was it? All right, let me continue.

• July 2003 - no big news during that month, most likely because of the summer holidays. Several options to tournaments (unrated tournaments - no BKR is affected, and private tournaments - only invited players can sign up) were added. As I have said, no breakthough at all, but the site was up and running.


• August 2003 - performance problems appeared, which was the reason why the automatic refresh of the main page was temporarily disabled for non-paying members. Although it didn't help too much, we had some time to pinpoint the problem source and replace the damaged parts of the database server. The second significant event of August 2003 was the appearance of the first Brain Maharajah membership level (which was created mostly as a joke but there are always nice people who want to support us). Six months subscription only but a great help anyway.


• September and October 2003 - it is funny but I cannot find any notes which would describe the events of these two months. It means that nothing important had occured. Or was I too lazy to post the news? On the other hand, it is no necessary to comment all months.

Several months ago (actually in August 2006) I have posted an entry about BrainKing button for Google Toolbar which I have developed in my spare time (this is the link to the article). Then I forgot about it. However, when I have tried to search "BrainKing" on Google today in the morning, one of the search results has been pointing to the Google Toolbar Button Gallery, the Gaming category. And BrainKing is really listed there (see the screenshot). If nothing else, it is a good link to us.

I have also improved the Logik model because many players have realized that it is not too convenient to change colors of the current guess before submitting - they had to click the browser's Back button many times to get rid of already placed pieces to replace them. Now, if you are making a move and want to change one color without starting the guess over, simply click the color at the current guessing line of the board. It will disappear instantly.

And thanks for all responses to the yesterday's entry about exchange rates and Euro problem. It is always nice to see that every problem (or "problem") has a simple solution and even if it is mostly about an "edge case" (as we programmers say), it can finally turn out as a nice feature which adds some useful information to the site at all.

The last question of this day - is there, please, someone who can speak English and Finnish and could spend some time translating BrainKing game rules to this language? Don't hesitate to contact me as soon as possible. And a new Romanian translator would be very appreciated as well.

I give up. It seems that if certain people don't want to see certain things, they won't see them, even if a big red flashing arrow points directly to them and shows a big label "HERE! HERE!". It is the only explanation I can think of after receiving three different e-mails concerning The Question "What is EUR? How can I get BrainKing membership fees in USD?".

On the other hand, I don't like to give up. The ultimate solution is here.

The Paid Membership now contains a new subpage called How much is it in my currency? and this link is located next to Overview | Details links, just below the Pawn Registry link. When you click it, you will see a table of BrainKing membership fees in 34 currencies. The calculations are made using daily charts from European Central Bank and although they can be slightly different to the ones which are applied on PayPal, they give a good overview and answer The Question in the easiest way.

Starting today, who sends The Question once more, will be called an idiot.
On the other hand, we wouldn't have this if it wasn't for them.

All right, this is it. As we announced before last Christmas, ten new games have been added to BrainKing in January 2007 (and it is not the end of the month yet). Let me make a short recapitulation:

• Cheversi
• Hawaiian Checkers
• Dice Chess
• Grasshopper
• Dice Poker
• Recycle Chess
• Triple Dice Poker
• Ice Age Chess
• Frog Finder
• Logik

And Logik is today's addition, you might know the game named Mastermind and it is very similar to it but the game is for two players, like all other games on BrainKing.
Time has come to do something a little different.

Well, my former intention was to release the last one of 10 new games in January today but the development and debugging and testing process has shown to be more complicated than it was supposed to be at the first glance. Which means no bad news, of course. But since we need to sleep too (YES!), the game will be released tomorrow. Definitely. Actually, the game is finished, debugged and tested, but I am too tired to release it now. Who would want to find a message box full of complaints "where are the rules?" or "I don't know how to play it" as a wake up surprise?

The second thing I would like to comment today is the problem (well, not a problem at all) of games with more than two players. Actually, we have Ponds but it is not a typical multi player board game because there is no board to play on. As you might know, BrainKing system currently does not support multi player games, which means that when I get a question of "could you add Ludo for 4 players?" type, the answer is still "not yet". We plan to have games for more than 2 players on BrainKing, there is no doubt about it, and maybe some games for less than 2 players as well. But now we cannot say when and it is not a task of priority number 1. At least not at this moment.

The rules of recently added froggy game Frog Finder have been added a while ago. Although this game is not supposed to reach the top of the most played games chart (because it requires to think more than in dice games), I like it and I am glad that Michael invented it. Find the rules here.

Just a quick small improvement - the list of finished matches (on a fellowship page) is sorted by the match end time now, the most recently finished match is the first. It should make the list better organized, at least as a temporary solution.

Today, we have started the second hundred of game types on BrainKing (which doesn't mean that it will be finished as well ) and the current total number of new games introduced in January 2007 is 9. It means that only one new game must be added and the promise of the Christmas Action would be fulfilled (well, at least a part of it). Anyway, I think that the variety of games supported on BrainKing is already good enough and it is not necessary to expand it at all costs.

The game number 101 is called Frog Finder and was invented by Michael Coan in 2006. It is a nice two-player variant of the Minesweeper game which is included in MS Windows set of simple games. Since, as usual, the rules has not been posted yet, you can find a good overview here.

Please don't get used to see a new game on BrainKing several times a week, it is just a temporary status and I don't expect to follow this trend in February. Everybody needs a rest.

There is not much to write about today, most likely because we have a snow in Prague at last, so I have spent some time staring at it. But there are still two minor improvements which have been added this day:

• Ice Age Chess rules have been posted and can be found here.


• Team match links are automatically translated to clickable names of the matches, when posted to a discussion board. For example, http://brainking.com/en/ShowMatch?mai=5474 would be transformed to Casino Royale (Lorien vs. Purple World).

I am glad to announce a release of the 100th game on BrainKing. Although dice games seem to be the most popular ones, this one does not contain dice. However, some kind of cubes you can find there. Ice cubes, in fact, and the game is called Ice Age Chess. It is an interesting and original Chess variant, created by Köksal Karakus in 2000, and its most significant feature is that the initial game position contains ice cubes filling the former blank spaces. And, of course, the ice barrier must be broken before classic moves can be made. Moreover, after each 20th move of the black player, an Ice Age comes and empty squares are filled with ice again (well, not all of them, more info in detailed rules). And, which is even worse, isolated pieces cannot survive if they are surrounded by an ice, so they freeze, die and disappear.

I will post all rules later today. But as I can see, brave players are already testing this game anyway.

I have got a flu or something like that, so I don't plan to work too much today and if someone has a question, please save it for a later time.

By the way, you might have noticed a new element at the right column of this blog - a map of visitors. It is a neat feature and I am currently testing it here. If nothing goes wrong, I would add it to the BrainKing.com site as well, as an addition to our statistics. Due to the high BrainKing's traffic it will probably cost us a small monthy fee (us - me and Liquid, not BrainKing users, of course) but it's not a problem because I like it and I like to spend money for things I like.

Dice Poker seems to be a great success (it has been catapulted to the 15th position at the table of most played games just a day after its release), so we have made a couple of improvements to the game interface (an option to select all dice by one click, the last move highlight, etc.) and released a more advanced version of this game a while ago. The new game is called Triple Dice Poker and this time it has been launched with the rules as well. This is a short summary:

• Each player has three columns to score points, not just one. The points at the second column are multiplied by two and the third column multiplies the points by three. For example, a small straight would be for 30 points at the first column, 60 points at the second one and 90 points at the third one.


• The game ends when all table cells are filled. It means that the game always has 39 moves.


• If a player gets at least 63 total points in the first 6 rows of the table (above the Bonus row) of a column, he will be given a bonus of 35 points for this column. The bonus values are displayed automatically when this condition is fulfilled.

I have been asked for a six dice variant but I guess the 100th game would be something else. We cannot have everything at once.

I have just added two new games and since I don't like writing the rules, they are not posted yet and you must either wait or try to play without them. But I am sure they will be finished very soon.

The games are:

• Dice Poker - a popular five-dice game in its basic variant. Although it has been tested and there should be no hidden bugs, I would like to wait (at least one day) before the more advanced triple version is released.


• Recycle Chess - an interesting variant where you can capture own pieces and reuse them later. It requires a completely different strategy, compared to Loop Chess, and I hope it will become a good alternative for classic Chess players.

More to come soon.

The Firefox extension I want to write about today (shouldn't I create a new category for this kind of entries?) is one of my favorites because it can be a great tool for BrainKing translators (but not only for them) if they want to submit new translations but cannot use a keyboard which marks the special characters locations.

With abcTajpu, you can easily insert any character using a simple context menu where the characters are accessed as logical groups to be found faster, or with predefined keyboard shortcuts. Simply go to the add-on page and follow the installation instructions, the page also contains a simple tutorial of the extension usage.

There is also a home page of the extension which contains a nice screenshot demonstrating the list of supported languages.

I have been sent this nice collection of useful BrainKing tips and I have decided to post them here at this moment because they look nice together. The author is King Reza who is also working on Farsi localization of BrainKing (which gives me a little headache because it's not easy to improve all pages to look good with right-to-left text but it is definitely worth this effort because we want to be open to all nations, so keep up the good work mate! ):

1. Do you think you've found something wrong with BrainKing? Don't post it in PM (private message) to Fencer! He's already too busy. Instead, look for a link on the left side of your page saying Bug Tracker and post the 'Bug' there. If its status gets updated, BK will automatically send you an e-mail
2. Are you totally new at BrainKing and not sure what game to try out of the many that exist? Check the number of running games by clicking on Statistics and then Running games. The numbers will show you how much specific games are popular. This may give you a hint as to which one to start with.
3. By checking the Paid Membership page you can understand what differences there are between different levels of membership on BrainKing.
4. Has a user been harassing you? Don't take it up to Fencer. Simply put them on your Blocked Users list. They won't be able to send you messages or see or accept your game invitations anymore.
5. Do you wish to help BrainKing be translated into more languages? Do you speak a language BK doesn't currently support? Offer Fencer a hand with the job as other members like yourself already have.
6. Always check your Settings page when a new game is introduced. There may be options there that can help you enjoy the game more.
7. Do you like a game very much and want to create many game invitations to it, but BrainKing doesn't let you make more than nine at a time? It's very simple. When you create the invitations, simply hit Backspace on your keyboard and you'll get back to the last page again. Hit Send again and you'll have another set of nine invitations.
8. Do you wish to practice a game without ruining your BKR status or rankings? Choose the games to be Uncounted when creating the game invitation.
9. Only paying members can have pictures as Icons next to their nickname. Pay for a membership and then on your profile page you'll see two new links on top of the page that will allow you to upload pictures.
10. Have you updated your profile page but don't see any changes made to it? It's not a bug. Fencer or another administrator will have to confirm the changes before they take effect.
11. You can change the shape and/or size of boards and pieces of some kinds of games on your Settings page.
12. Do you get kicked out of BrainKing? It happens occasionally when there are many users online or sometimes do to the server problems they may be experiencing. Simply be patient and try again a few minutes later.
13. Do you see a green dot beside a players name showing they are online, but they aren't making a move or answering the message you've just sent them? They may have closed their Browser without having logged out from the site. In this case BK realizes they are no longer online up to 5 minutes after they do so. Don't take offense.
14. To get a better idea of how strong a person is in a game, take a look at their profile and look for their established BKR. That's the number written in bold format and is not in italics. Provisional BKRs are sometimes misleading or even deceiving.
15. Take a look at the Ratings page to see the top players in each type of game. If you click on a game name, you'll see other players ordered by their BKR from the strongest to the weakest.

When the Fischer's Clock time control was introduced, as a possibility to play fast games without waiting for opponent's vacation days running out, we have added a no time control option as well. Shortly said, if 0 days and 0 hours per move is set for a game invitation or tournament, the game(s) will never timeout, which means that if one player stops playing or visiting BrainKing, such game never ends. It is a good choice if two close friends wants to play a game and don't care if the game lasts for 10 years, but it is also a risk if you are a Brain Pawn and several games with no time control reduce your number of empty game slots.

Because of that, a bold red warning note is displayed at a no time control game invitation to highlight this fact and give the invited player a chance to be aware of the potential risk. However, it doesn't seem to be too effective because almost every week I receive a request to finish or delete a game where one player does not move and no timeout can penalize him for that.

I don't want to remove this option because it has its advantages. On the other hand, I have no idea how to make the no timeout warning better visible. If you know how to solve this small problem, please let me know.