BrainKing.info - the BrainKing game site knowledge base

Google returns 908,000 results for "BrainKing" keyword. Not bad. From time to time, I check this search pattern because nobody knows who can write about us where and what.

Thanks to that, I have noticed that a service called BugMeNot, which offers public accounts to many other sites (to bypass a registration process), contains BrainKing in its database:

http://www.bugmenot.com/view/brainking.com

The description is kind of misguided: Login with the free account passwords below to bypass compulsory registration. It is a known fact that registering a BrainKing account is not compulsory if you want to browse the site in a guest mode without playing, and there are not too much free membership features which would not be available without logging in.

Since I want to make some observations, the "public account" won't be deleted immediately, although it violates our Terms and Conditions (User Agreement). Anyway, if you play with a user named bugmenot, please acknowledge that anyone can access this account. Until I disable it, which will probably happen soon.

It's been a busy day with many non-BrainKing affairs (but, from a specific point of view, very important for BrainKing as well) on agenda. So there are not many changes except two minor ones:

• When a BrainKing photo album is being browsed, every photo thumbnail is shown with a number of comments. It is no longer necessary to visit a page with details for each photo separately to find out if someone has been commenting it.


• The "entry point" page of photo albums contains a list of more recent public photo comments now. And, like the last public photo list feature, a link "show all" can be clicked to get a list of all public comments, which is planned to be searchable as well.

There is an idea of a new special membership order action. It must be finetuned first but the odds are quite high.

Another very nice game idea from Andy Lewicki is the subject of today's entry.

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Name of the game: Fourmate (or Fourmation, which one is better?)

Rules: (a combination of several different games)

BORROWED from Fisher Random Chess:
- initial position (random), without pawns.
- no castles
- no "killing" other pieces
- no checks
BORROWED from 4(5) in line:
- players trying to arrange exactly 4 (no 5, 6, ...) of their pieces either in a row (horizontally, vertically or diagonally) or in a square 2x2.
- above formation MUST NOT have more than 2 pieces on player's half of the board.
BORROWED from Connect 6:
- white moves first ONE of his pieces anywhere on the board according to chess rules.
- black moves TWO of his pieces anywhere on the board but these two pieces cannot touch each other, they have to be at least one squares apart.
- white moves again ONE of his pieces anywhere.
... and so game continues this way.
GOAL:
The player who assembles 4 pieces (exactly) as a first in a way prescribed above, becomes the winner.

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I am always glad to see a new idea which is based on Chess but does not require real Chess playing skills. And I am sure that everybody can learn how to move Chess pieces.

A weekend days means (almost) no work, resulting in just two minor improvements. But both of them could be handy:

• It is possible to list all public photo albums now. Go to the Photo albums page and click the "show all public photo albums" link at the "Newest public photo albums" section. This is an option for those who want to browse all public photos we currently have on BrainKing. A search option will be added too, later.


• BrainKing Bookmarks extension for Firefox 2.0 or newer has been improved by a photo album function. If you install the most recent version and right-click on an image at any web page, an item Save to BrainKing Photo Albums ... should appear and if it is used, a photo album page will appear with instructions how to add the selected photo. Get the extension from this page.

By the way, I have downloaded a cool free media player for my Pocket PC and it perfectly plays all movies but I haven't found out if it supports subtitles and how to turn them on - anybody knows that?

If you have no games to play at this moment, feel free to try out this mctrivia's AI Player - playing Ludo against the computer. I've been already mentioning this tool some days ago, but now it is possible to use it directly on BrainKing.info site, and if it proves to be stable, I can add a permanent link to BrainKing game site as well.
Important! Please note that the following Ludo code is not generated by any BrainKing site. It is included from mctrivia's own server, so if it is not currently working, it means that he is probably fixing bugs or adding new features at the moment - just try to reload this page after a while. Thank you.

AI Ludo Provided by Matthew Cornelisse

And since BrainKing.info articles need a better organization (according to the number of entries), a new category BrainKing Extensions has been created.

The recently released system of BrainKing photo albums has gained an important milestone today. Besides a few bugfixes, it is finally available to all registered users of BrainKing, paying or non-paying. In other words, everybody is allowed to create own photo album(s) and since it is planned to integrate photo albums with personal messages and discussion boards, it will be very easy to share favorite photos with other BrainKing users soon - I like to give this kind of vitality to too "text only" content.

And since our disk storage is not endless, users with a free membership level have the following limitations:

• Only 10 MB free space for photos.


• All photos must be approved by BrainKing administrators before they appear.

When we succeed to expand our server park by more machines, there is a big chance that the data storage limits per user would be significantly increased. It should have a positive impact to features related to board games too, naturally.

This is another game proposal by Andy Lewicki and since BrainKing has no domino games yet, it might be worth a discussion about this topic. Or maybe not - anyway, this proposal sounds very interesting.

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Name: Dominate
Initial info:

• From the whole set of 6x6 domino (28 tiles) set all the doubles (7 in all) are removed and not take part in the game.
• Game is to be played on a grid 6x6 giving 36 fields, which divided by 2 gives 18 double fields - this is the number of domino tiles distributed evenly to players.

Rules:

• Each player gets 9 tiles of domino and keep them unseen for the opponent and 3 domino tiles are left unused till the end of the game, face down.
• First player puts any domino tile on the board on any chosen place, either horizontally of vertically.
• Second player puts any chosen tile on any chosen place on the board, with restrictions below:
  • No row or column may have the half of domino tile with the same number of pips at any time of the game.
  • When the player has no more available moves, he loses the game

This simple game has enormous depth of strategic possibilities, players may guess only a portion of what tiles might be in opponent's hand (three of them are removed from the game but players do not know which).
It's highly unlikely that the game will be drawn. To fill the whole board with 18 tiles players would have to cooperate (solitaire-like mode) which will not be the case. So, prepare yourself for fierce fight from the very beginning.

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And since I am not a domino player at all, perhaps someone who is more experienced would post a comment about this idea.

I am very pleased to see that the number of public photo albums on BrainKing is growing and people really use it. There were also a few improvement tips posted to discussion boards, so I guess that it could become a really popular feature, which deserves a further development - what about, for instance, an option to include photo thumbnails to discussion board posts? Or a sophisticated system to transfer whole photo albums from other public services of this kind?

One of possibilities which I really like on the photo album system is that it offers several levels of privacy to set, so it is easy to specify the target audience to see the particular album photos (actually, this privacy level system is going to be applied to more BrainKing functions soon). One of the options is called selected users and it allows the album owner to specify BrainKing users (one by one) which would be able to access the album.

And since the "find and select" function didn't work well in some cases (for example, if the target user name was too short, so the search found more than 100 results and returned an error message instead), a new option Exact match has been added to all forms when a user name is to be searched for. If this option is set, the finding process will return only the user name which matches the keyword exactly - otherwise, it returns all user names which contain the specified keyword.

As far as I know, this small improvement should solve at least one recent issue I am aware of, and it can be handy in other cases as well.

Although every paying member of BrainKing can upload one icon (small 40x50 picture) and one photo (bigger 200x300 picture) to his Profile, it seems that it is not enough for some enthusiasts, regarding the frequency of their photo changes. This is not a complaint, just an observation. And, in order to give BrainKing users a better flexibility to work with images, the Photo Albums feature has been introduced.

The usage is very simple:

• Click Photo albums link at the left column, just above the "Message box" menu item.
• Click Create a new photo album or browser public albums of other users.
• Set the access level - make it public, private, for your friends only, etc.
• Use the Add new photo form to upload a photo to your album. Please note that it is possible to select either an image file at your local computer or a web image URL. And since we call it "Photo albums", it would be nice if only photos are stored there, without breaking any copyrights.
• Name it, describe it, comment it, organize them, etc.

Since some tests must be finished first, there are a few temporary restrictions:

• Only paying members can create albums and upload photos.
• The limit is 60 MB per user.

I have interesting plans with this BrainKing feature but don't want to make it "overfeatured" too early. There are always other things to do.

And today is a "BrainKing user message" day again. This time there is something from mctrivia, who is the author of BrainKing application for Facebook:

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Matthew Cornelisse (mctrivia) has created a new AI autoplayer which can be played on the "BrainKing on Facebook" application. As a promotion he will be giving away 3 Brain Bishop memberships as a draw. Every player gets a ticket to the draw each time they beat the AI Player. The draw will be held on 1st May 2008. If you win and do not need the prize you can chose any pawn to receive it on your behalf.

You can find the player here: http://apps.facebook.com/brainking/ludo.php

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I would like to add that:

• I am always glad to announce and support any activities of this kind. If you create a BrainKing related application or web site or anything else which is dedicated to BrainKing or brings benefits to its users, and want to let people know about it, don't hesitate to contact me. It might be worth adding a new category to this blog site.
• The mentioned AI Player is Matthew's creation, not mine. In case of any problems, please contact him, not me.

Regarding the last point, the AI Player can be commented here as well, of course. Unless I am expected to answer the questions.

A very short schedule outage of BrainKing game site is planned on Monday 7th April 2008, 6:00 - 6:20 a.m. GMT+01:00 (and a daylight saving time shift - is it +1 hour or -1 hour? I am never sure about it. And who the hell invented this stupid rule?)

Since I want to release a new feature which requires a little more disk space than is currently available, the storage system must be reconfigured to ensure that all new data are reliably replicated and backed up. Which is, er, the reason of the announced outage.

I don't spend my time testing products in beta status too often (frankly, I don't remember when I did it for the last time) but since Firefox web browser is something what I use every day and I belong to the group of its supporters, I have decided to try out the most recent public beta version - Firefox 3 Beta 5 - at least to check if BrainKing needs some style modifications because of possible Firefox 3 specific behavior.

Well, after a few hours of active using and trying everything possible, I am impressed. Positively.

As far as I can say, it is definitely the fastest Firefox so far, most likely thanks to its new rendering engine. BrainKing contains many optional JavaScript features which look nice but can make a browser "a little" slower when all of them are activated at the same time, so it was one of details I wanted to test as soon as possible. And since all my attempts to make Firefox 3 jammed or at least overloaded by all possible popups, pulldowns, fade-ins or flying dragons absolutely failed, I can only say "wow!" to the programmers - this is definitely a big step forward.

This article is not meant to publish a full featured review, I just wanted to express my experiences and personal opinion. Which is exactly what blogs are designed to.

A very short overview of pros:

• It is faster. In some cases, much faster.
• It looks "nicer". It is hard to describe but I have a much better feeling when I work with Firefox 3, compared to previous versions.
• Smart bookmarks - the most visited pages are automatically bookmarked to a special folder. Right now, I know that my most frequent activity on BrainKing during last hour was to submit new entries to the BrainKing Translator database.
• BrainKing Bookmarks add-on work with it.

Cons:

• Many add-ons don't work with it because they are not upgraded to Firefox 3 yet.
• It is still a beta version, so it can be unstable on some platforms or computers.
• Regarding the previous point, some web pages can behave "strangely", as I heard from a few people. However, although I tried to display as many different pages as possible and did the worst possible things with them, I could not reproduce anything unusual. Strange. But good for me.

And a quick look to BrainKing statistics page says that 1.2% visitors of our site are already browsing the web with Firefox 3. That's a very good start.

Get it here if you want to give it a try.

This proposal of a version of the popular Knight Fight game has been created by MadMonkey and tenuki. It seems that people like Knight Fight so much that they would like to try new variants of this original game as well - and since we already have some of them in our collection of hot tips to be implemented, there is a good chance to make them satisfied.

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Dark Knight Fight

1. Board set up exactly same (with exception of all double values 00, 11, 22 etc....are now replaced by Stars).


2. In addition opponents can NOT see each others scores.


3. Game start, only Top & Bottom Rows are visible to both players (all others values hidden). This is the only point both players can see both Rows of numbers.


4. Player A starts by picking any square on his first row as normal.


5. 1. All other visible squares (Top & Bottom Rows) are now hidden from him.(Point - make notes)
   2. Once he has selected, he gets those points and ONLY then are his next available squares shown to HIM (note: ONLY him, not his opponent).
   3. When Player B makes his first move the same happens, he can see BOTH Rows to start, once he selects his square they are hidden from him as well.
   4. When Player selects number, the mirror is deleted as normal. This mirror is shown to the opponent for just the following move before being blanked out.(Point - make notes to keep track of opponents score)


6. Play then carries on as the normal game. Once a player selects his move, any other squares showing are hidden, and his next ones shown to him.


7. Exceptions are the 10 Star squares. These will NOT be on either first starting Rows. Under these will be 10 values (5 of them will be +100 points, 5 will be -100 points). A player choosing to land on a Star, takes a gamble to gain 100 points or lose 100 points.


8. Game over as normal, when no valid squares for a player to move to. Most points wins.

After some thought we decided that squares used, will be shown as used & also Stars will be shown to both players (i.e. +100 or -100) to keep track of how many used.

The basic idea is to make the game more fun, but also include the chance to take a gamble (the stars). Also great emphasis is being put on players to keep notes (if they want to win). Opponents are only shown Mirrors for their go following so it is down to them to keep note of there opponents score if they wish.

It may take some testing as we did have to think about certain things (e.g. should used squares be shown or left blank so players could trap themselves).

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Well, anybody wants to comment this?

I have received an inquiry about the recently updated list of paid membership advantages, more precisely about the point 3.2. This is what the mentioned section says:

"Paying members can upload a small 40x50 picture (which is called icon) to their profiles. Icons are shown next to the player's name on many important pages - game pages, discussion boards, private messages etc."

The problem is that the section deals with icons only, so what happened to user photos? (bigger 200x300 images)
Actually, the Paid Membership page is correct and only the small image, which is displayed on game pages, discussion boards etc., is going to remain as a privilege for paying members. User photos will be replaced by user photo albums, which will allow any registered user to upload more images, organize them in folders (albums), share them with other users etc. It is a logical decision, making this feature more flexible and, as a side effect, solving another long term problem.

I've been too optimistic again, so this feature is not released yet because it's not fully finished yet. However, if nothing unexpected happens, it should go live very soon.

BrainKing is continuously cooperating with many other sites and one of our best partners is 300AD.com, coincidentally owned by very good friends of mine, which usually results in something special for BrainKing members. And the action of April is no exception.

Just a side note - although it is 1st April today, this article is meant absolutely seriously and there is no hidden catch. I don't feel like posting an April Fool message this time (although the last year one was a quite success, so to say).

BrainKing April Action

The rules are very simple. Every BrainKing user, who purchases or renews at least 1 year membership of any level in April 2008, will get a 50% discount of a full retail version of ArcaMania game. It means that you can have this very nice piece of funny game (I have it installed on all my computers and play it at least a few minutes every day - it is a great way to relax after a mind boggling work) for only 4.41 Euro.

How does it work?

• You make a 1 year (or longer) membership order at BrainKing's shopping cart system.
• When the payment is received, BrainKing automatically sends you a discount coupon message - it simply informs you that you have qualified for the April Action and adds a link to your order page.
• The page of your order would contain the usual information and below that, you should see the following lines:
  You have received a special bonus to your order - a 50% discount of the full version of ArcaMania.
  This discount is valid from 1/4 2008 to 30/4 2008. Please click here to apply the coupon: (followed by a BUY NOW button)
• If you decide to take advantage of the action, just click the BUY NOW button - the 50% discount will be automatically applied.
• More information about the game is shown at the next section. It is possible to scroll through it and read all details.

And since I have already programmed an automatic system to handle actions like this one, it would be a pity to use it for only one month. It is very likely that special offers will continue in the next months as well, giving at least 50% discount to other games by 300AD.com.