Chess Game Menu

Chess Games for Web Pages

Pratt's Home Page

by John P. Pratt

Here's a way to record instructional chess games (or your own games) to put on a website, so that anyone with a browser that supports javascript (Netscape 4 or IE 4) can replay them visually. There are many instructional chess sites on the web, but very few that I could find where the games of the masters can be replayed visually and quickly right on the web. This page produces games which do not require the user to download anything to play it (other than what the browser downloads automatically).

Currently, to use this recorder, Netscape is require for the recording phase only. (There is a bug in IE). Just play the game above by clicking on the pieces you want to move. After you click on the piece to move it will begin to blink. [Update Note of 24 Nov 2007: If the pieces do not blink, find a browser where they do. Currently Firefox does not work, but IE and Opera do.] Then click on the place to move it to complete the move. It will record the moves, including en passant and pawn promotion, but the only warning it will give for an illegal move is that black and white must take turns moving. In other words, it has no other knowledge of rules. If you make a mistake recording the game, simply press the backarrow above the game and go back to the last correct move, and start again from that point. If you want to start the game completely over, or simply want to review the entire game, press the "Start" button and you will go back to the very start (at which point you could begin a new game if desired).

When you are done playing the game, press the "Done" button, and a new window will open with the entire game in it, ready to be replayed. After pressing the "Done" button, you can no longer change that game. To then save the game, choose "View Source" and then "Save" from the file menu of your browser on that new window. After saving it, you may then immediately record another game. It is a fast process, the games I recorded in my examples were all done in about two hours.

After saving the file you need to do two things to put the games up on your web page:

• Go to the www.johnpratt.com/items/chess/ directory and download the file "chess_game.zip", which contains the javascript and icons to play the recorded game. Unzip that file and put the contents into the web directory where the games will be.
• You need to edit the downloaded game file by changing the words FAKESCRIPT to SCRIPT in four places in the first few lines in the area. You also need to move the > character at the end of the line ending with "board" to the line above after the words "text/javascript". Or maybe you need to even delete those lines altogether, as I did recently using Internet Explorer 6 which inserted corrected lines for me.

Good luck. If you have any trouble understanding the above instructions, simply do a "view source" on any of the example games on my page and edit yours to have the same major features.