Play Chess online with Game Courier

Game Courier let's you play Chess, as well as many other Chess variants, by online correspondence. Click on a button below to select the board, pieces, and rendering method you prefer. The board may be rendered as an HTML table, with CSS, or as a graphic image in the GIF, JPG, or PNG format. You may change any of these settings during the course of your game and further customize them to suit your taste. 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 may 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.