BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

In order to make more people happy (but definitely not everybody), the second cluster of team tournaments is scheduled to 1st - 10th October 2007. But, of course, team can start to sign up now and there is enough time to decide which good players recruit before some other captain does the same. This is the October list:

• The Motion Picture (Dice Poker)
• The Wrath of Khan (Mancala)
• The Search for Spock (Battleboats Plus)
• The Voyage Home (Hyper Backgammon)
• The Final Frontier (Spider Line4)
• The Undiscovered Country (Hawaiian Checkers)
• Generations (Behemoth Chess)
• First Contact (Ice Age Chess)
• Insurrection (Assimilation)
• Nemesis (Hasami Shogi)

Actually, I like the movies of Akira Kurosawa too. It gives me an idea.

I don't think it would be necessary to write about it in the blog, because I could observe that people have started to inform their team members about the new team tournaments in minutes after posting them, but since there are some other things I would like to comment, the entry is being created anyway.

• First - the start of all team tournaments of this kind is scheduled to 1st September 2007. The reason is that many people are not available during the summer holidays and they would not be able to catch the deadlines.


• Second - since the current "schedule" of creating team tournaments is more chaotic than regular, I plan to prepare additional tools to admin them and pass this process to another person. I am sure it will be handled much better than it is now.

Team Tournaments.

The rules of the recently added chess variant called Behemoth Chess have been posted a while ago. The finished games statistics shows similar number of wins by white and black players, so it seems that the game is (thanks to its strong random factor) balanced and no player has a significant advantage. I know that the numbers cannot be extremely accurate so early but the first impression is not bad at all.

By the way, if a player is very unlucky, he can easily lose the game at the first move. It is a small drawback of the Behemoth abilities but it is just a part of the rules and I don't want to complain about it. What I want to solve it that, according to BrainKing's rating rules, a game with less than 2 moves is not counted for BKR, no matter if it has been defined as rated or not. Which means that Behemoth Chess games where a king is destroyed at the first move are never counted for BKR changes. The question is - should it be left as it is or should this rule be changed to count all Behemoth Chess games for rating, even if only one move is completed?

Maybe this is not a big issue at all but if anyone wants to express his opinion to this subject, it will be always appreciated.

33 is the current number of chess variants which can be played on BrainKing. The most recent addition is called Behemoth Chess and could be suitable for players who don't mind to play with a random factor, instead of excelling in the classic chess theory.

And, as usual, the game is already released but the rules are not posted yet. Let me make a short description of the game. It is played on a standard 8x8 chessboard with the traditional set of chess pieces. The rules of playing are the same as for the western chess, so where is a difference?

One of the central fields - D4 - is occupied by a Behemoth, the piece of a destruction. BrainKing displays it as our dragon smiley until we manage to get an original picture (but this one is nice too, isn't it?). After every move of a player, the Behemoth moves 1-4 spaces (randomly determined) in a randomly chosen direction, and destroys everything what is in its way. There is no chess or checkmate - the game ends when a king is captured either by an opponent's piece or the Behemoth. It is also possible that the Behemoth destroys both kings simultaneously - then the game ends as a draw.

Although the game has its official rules, it is likely that we make some changes to it in the future, in order to make the game more interesting and better playable. But it is a point to discuss.

As we have already announced several days ago, there is going to be a scheduled downtime of BrainKing sites today, about 40 minutes after posting this short entry. I write "sites", not "site", because, due to limitations of the former machine (which is to be replaced), all our projects share the same database server, which means that all of them will be unavailable for 2 hours (maybe less, maybe a little more).

Since this change brings only positive things, there is no reason to postpone it. And, as usual, when BrainKing is up and running again, it will automatically disable the game time, so no timeouts will occur in the next 24 hours - enough time for users from all time zones to check their started games and make moves where necessary.

RSS, which stands for "Really Simple Syndication", is an important part of the contemporary internet and there are people who use it as the easiest way how to read many different sources of information on a daily basis. And since I like this technology and I like to implement my favourite technologies on BrainKing as well, our pool of RSS sources has two new additions.

Tournaments and Ponds.

Actually, I think that particularly these two feeds can be very useful for people who want to be aware of newly created public tournaments and/or ponds without visiting the Tournaments and Ponds pages every day and trying to recognize what has changed since the last visit. The RSS reader does this boring job automatically and it is much easier than to develop a notification system on BrainKing (which is another thing to consider but I want to write more about this idea later).

There are many parameters to use when a list of tournaments is built and I hope that I didn't omit anything to generate the corresponding RSS feeds (indicated by the RSS icon). If there are any bugs, please let me know.

According to the recent improvements of BrainKing's RSS channels (see two previous entries of this blog), there is a good news for everyone who uses FeedBurner as his favourite RSS reader. Since Google has recently bought this company (for about 100 million USD), the "pro" features (which were formerly available for paying customers only) are now accessible for free.

And since it is not likely that Google would buy BrainKing as well, our paying members only services remain to be available for paying members only.

There is also a new option for Ponds - a creator can specify whether the pond will start immediately when the maximum players are signed up (if a maximum is defined), even before its deadline. This feature is already being used in tournaments and seems to be useful.

After 3 months of no changes on the Server News page, I have had a reason to use it because we plan to make an important hardware upgrade and it cannot be done without turning off the site for 2 hours. Let me post the details once more:

A scheduled downtime of BrainKing is planned on Thursday 12th July 2007, 18:00 p.m. GMT+01:00 due to the database server upgrade. The action should not exceed 2 hours. When it is done, BrainKing will automatically suspended the game time for 24 hours, in order to avoid timeouts in games with low time control (1 hour and similar). Thank you for understanding.

There is also a good improvement for those who like to observe and comment new entries at BrainKing's Bug Tracker. The page now contains a customizable RSS feed which can be configured by the search form to list results based only on your selected parameters. The feed length is limited to 50 bugs but if someone has a good reason to list more of them at once, I can add it as another option.

If there is any other part of BrainKing which could be RSSed, please post your suggestions to this article comments.

I have just installed a new beta version of the Flock 0.9 web browser, in order to test it with BrainKing etc. Actually, I never heard of this product before, so I have decided to improve my knowledge and try it out. To my surprise, BrainKing works perfectly with Flock 0.9 beta and behaves almost identically like with Firefox 2.0. Well, it's not a big surprise at all because Flock seems to be built on the same Gecko core and technology.

Please, if someone knows more about Flock and has a proof that it's not just a new Firefox clone, give me the details. I would like to know if this browser is worth adding to the list of BrainKing supported ones.

I have also added a new RSS channel to BrainKing. Since tonight, you can check the list of games where it is your turn to move by this alternative method, if you prefer to start your favourite RSS reader before opening BrainKing in a web browser. If you are logged in, you should see a image at the top right corner of the game section at your Main Page. This small image points to the feed source which can be imported to your reader. I have just tested it with my account and it seems to be working, so don't hesitate to experiment with that.

People are varios, different and omnifarious, especially BrainKing users, and what is ideal for one player, can be annoying for another one. Take the time control system, for instance. It features two main time control types - time per move and time for game. The differences and described in detail at BrainKing's FAQ page and BrainRook articles, so we won't write about them once more. As some old timer might recall, the time for game (Fischer's clock) option was added as a reaction to complaints about slow games using vacation days, so we created a time control with no vacation days at all, beyond some more features.

The point is that unexperienced BrainKing users usually overlook the time control information while accepting a game invitation, which can lead to a sudden timeout when a player, who believes to play a classic time per move game, makes a move and does not open the game page in next 14 days. The new option, which has been added to the Settings / Game filter page on BrainKing game site, tries to solve this problem, at least partially. From now, everyone can choose if he wants to get game invitations with Time per move only, Time for game only or All time control types. Are you tired of Fischer's clock deepnesses? Simply select the Time per move only option and nobody will be able to invite you to a Fischer's clock game anymore.

Goodnight and sin no more.

First of all, we want to thank everyone who participated in the yesterday's red code action and I hope that all of them enjoy their bonuses. A nice amount of free membership months is always a pleasant gift. And since we don't extend actions with limited time periods which are announced in advance, this opportunity won't be offered again, until a special and rare event happens.

Second, a small new improvement has been added today. If you play many ponds at once and want to postpone the selected one(s) while making moves in the rest, simply use the button Play later which works the same as for normal games. This feature affects only paying members because nobody else can run around the pond on BrainKing.

The announced 100% bonus action has been started 10 and half hours ago and many people have already turned it to their profit. Since there are still 13 and half hours left (at this moment) and not everyone reads the blog history, let me describe the action rules once more:

Today is The Day and the red code is activated - which means 100% bonus to all purchased memberships during this day. With usual restrictions - the purchased membership must be for 1 year or longer time and it must be a real purchase - no Brains used. And the payment must be received within 72 hours after the order is placed, otherwise the bonus will not be applied.

Is that all? No!

A special bonus for the fastest ones! The first 20 participants of this action will receive another bonus of 1-6 extra months (randomly chosen) to the subscribed membership level. It means that if you make a fast payment which can be instantly received (PayPal or MoneyBookers) and you make, for example, a purchase of 1 year Brain Rook level, you will receive 25-30 months for the price of 12 months. Not a bad deal. And there are still several slots left.

The final note - since the "bonus to the bonus" feature is not planned to be used again in the future, it was not worth implementing an automatic system at the BrainKing code. That's why the 1-6 extra months addition is done manually by the administrators. Which means that if your payment is automatically processed and the 100% bonus added to your account, please don't panic because the second bonus does not appear immediately. Everything is under control.

In order not to bury this information under a usual amount of blog article information, I want to be VERY short today:

• The limit of 50,000 registered users has been exceeded during this morning.


• The Independence Day action will be activated tomorrow, on 00:00:01 (GMT+01:00), which is 7 hours after this entry is published.

If you are interested, please read the details here.

Not too many days ago I wrote a short article about seeding rules for single elimination tournaments which are used on BrainKing. The purpose of that entry was that many people didn't understand why they start to play with top rated opponents, which usually leads to a sure loss. Shortly said, the play-off system has its advantages (in order to make the final rounds more interesting) but does not seem to be suitable for everyone.

For those who prefer a random factor, instead of strict seeding rules, I have added a new option called Sort players by BKR which can be set while a new tournament is being created. This switch is checked by default (set as "yes") because that's how the seedings has been working for all tournaments so far. Now, if you turn it off, the players will be paired randomly, not based by their BKRs.

This option can be used for all types of tournaments.

All right, the million event, which has been announced yesterday, deserves a celebration, so we are going to reincarnate the popular color codes once more. At some day of this week, the red code will appear for 24 hours, from 00:00:01 to 23:59:59 of the site time zone (GMT+01:00).

But which day is it going to be?

I have made some research and found out that there are many holidays of the same kind in July - the independence days. Let me show several examples:

• 3rd July - Independence Day of Belarus
• 4th July - Independence Day of Rwanda
• 5th July - Independence Day of Algeria and Cape Verde Islands
• 6th July - Independence Day of Comoros
• 7th July - Independence Day of Solomon Islands

One of the listed days will be randomly picked to activate the red code day - which means 100% bonus to all purchased memberships during that day. With usual restrictions - the purchased membership must be for 1 year or longer time and it must be a real purchase - no Brains used. And the payment must be received within 72 hours after the order is placed, otherwise the bonus will not be applied.

Is that all? No!

A special bonus for the fastest ones! The first 20 participants of this action will receive another bonus of 1-6 extra months (randomly chosen) to the subscribed membership level. It means that if you make a fast payment which can be instantly received (PayPal or MoneyBookers) and you make, for example, a purchase of 1 year Brain Rook level, you will receive 25-30 months for the price of 12 months. Not a bad deal.

Just watch the flashing light bulb.

What's that? I hear some displeased voices ... oh yes, of course. 4th July is the Independence Day of United States too.