Play Episcopal Chess online with Game Courier

Episcopal Chess is a completely symmetric alternative to Chess that extends the board by one column and replaces the Queen with two more Bishops. Game Courier let's you play Episcopal Chess, as well as a plethora of other Chess variants, by online correspondence. A selection of board/piece combinations for Episcopal Chess is provided below, and further customization is available. Click on one of the buttons below to begin. These buttons indicate whether your game will be rendered as an HTML table, with CSS, or as a graphic image in the GIF, JPG, or PNG format. Games will normally occur asynchronously with other people online, with Game Courier keeping a record of the game, enforcing the rules, and automating castling and en passant. Moves can be entered with the mouse without any knowledge of notation.

The preceding presets all make use of the chess include file. This is good enough for Chess and for some games very close to Chess. But it is not versatile enough to handle Cannons, and it requires the developer of other games to program the movement of new pieces twice, once to check whether a move is legal, and once more to check whether the King is attacked by a piece. Since writing that include file, I have written an include file called chess2. Although it isn't needed for Chess, which is handled well enough by the original chess include file, it is good to have a Chess preset that uses it. For my part, it helps me test the include file to make sure it is working right. For developers, it provides a working example of how to use the chess2 include file in a preset. It's main advantages over the original chess include file are that it is more versatile and it is easier to program new pieces for use with it. If you are interested in writing rule-enforcing presets for Game Courier, I highly recommend starting with a study of the chess2 include file and the Chess preset that uses it.