Some Chess-related web applets

[hgm]

I posted a few interactive pages on chessvariants.com, where people can play either end-games with almost arbitrary unorthodox pieces against an ed-game table, or a chess variant with pieces of their own design against a shallow alpha-beta searcher. The EGT of course plays perfectly; the alpha-beta searcher is set to low depth to make an entertaining opponent for someone that just got acquianted with the variant.

There are two pages for the end-game applet: the one for 3-men end-games works for boards up to 16x16, and does not only support rectangular boards, but also boards with corner irregularities, such as in Omega Chess, the Gustavian board or the chess.com 4-player board. It also allows the rule variations where stalemate is also a win, or even forcing the bare King into a corner is. It contains a graphical interface to specify the move of the piece. (The Kings are always supposed to be orthodox Kings.)

There also is a 4-men version of this applet; It puts the additional requirement on the board size that it doesn't contain more than 108 squares. (This allows 10x10 Gustavian boards, and 12x12 Omega and 4-player-style boards.) Just like in the 3-men applet the pieces can be divergent. (I.e. have different captures and non-captures.)

The 'play-test applet' features a board and a large table of pieces with pre-programmed names and moves, which you can drag to the board (after formatting it to the desired size) to set up an initial position; if the table doesn't provide what you want you can redefine name and move of the pieces in there. For defining the move there is a similar graphical interface as in the end-game applet. This only allows entry of simple moves; for really complex moves (such as sliders that turn corners, or pieces that capture like Checkers) you would have to type the description, (there is an aid for that elsewhere), but such pieces occur very rarely. After setting it up you can then play against the alpha-beta AI.

You are all invited to have a look at these applets, and comment on them; In particular I am curious whether the user interface is adequate, easily operable and intuitively clear.