Dots-and-boxes Board 1.0

Dots-and-boxes Board 1.0 is released for Dots-and-boxes players to analyze and share game records. Similar to the Havannah Board and Connect6 Board, you can import games from LG.

Let me know if you’ve noticed any bugs or have feature suggestions.

Thanks, this is very nice and it knows when boxes are drawn and the colour of next player too (I was a bit disappointed about the lack of win detection for Havannah).

Would it be possible to display chess notation with a1 lower left horizontal, with either the short notation a1 for lowest left horizontal move, a2 for lowest left vertical move... or the notation a1-b1, a1-a2 for the same moves?

Also I think for all games it would be really nice if clicking a move did not erase the list (or even better the tree) of next moves, so you can move back and forth in (or analyze) the game. My model is Jhex or Allan's Twixt analyser.

Excellent suggestions! Thanks.

Regarding the Havannah board, the initial release left out a few non-critical features as I wanted to get something out quickly. But I definitely will add winning detection in the near future.

I didn't find a canonical notation system for dots-and-boxes online, so I wrote one that seemed reasonable to me. Now I can see that it may not be very intuitive and could hinder game discussions; however, I don't like the rather lengthy "a1-b1" notation because too much redundant information is encoded. I'm thinking about switching to a system where a move is denoted as either the lower edge or left edge of a box. For example, the lower left horizontal would be "a1-", and the top right vertical on a 5x5 board would be "e5|".

Click-to-remove is an ill-conceived feature. Mea culpa! I'll fix it. I don't plan to support trees any time soon, though.

I don't see really game 1488898 when I import it. probably I missssed something.

This is what I see on my computer:

Does this particular game fail for you or you can't import any games from LG?

Works for me too, you could consider also importing the player names.

While starting up "http://www.trmph.com/dnb/board#5" and then typing in a game number does work, bookmarking would be easier if the game number could be put into the URL, e.g., something like "http://www.trmph.com/dnb/board#5?gid=1488898". You could then set up one bookmark for each of your games in progress.

The way it works now, the current state of a game is encoded in the URL, e.g. "http://www.trmph.com/dnb/board#5,e10c10d9c8a1d8d10e8b7b8a7c5c3c1b12b9a3a9a2a6e3d6e2c4f3e1", which, if bookmarked, means you have to put in manually any moves that have taken place since your last analysis and make a fresh bookmark (or re-enter the game number, which sounds too much like work).

I must say, by omitting the light blue lines, you've made your board more readable than the LG board.

I still get only 6 wrong moves and as I am pasting the game number and you all got the right game

Re notation: Perhaps you should use the notation introduced by wccanard? He includes all dots, lines and boxes. The lower left dot ia a1. The line to the right of this is b1, the next dot c1, the next line d1 and so on. The vertical line in the lower left is a2. The lower left box is b2. The next vertical line is b3, the next box is b4 and so on. This means that a 5x5 board has notations from a1 to k11, and that you can talk about every dot, box and line using this notation.

I work with IE.8
and the importation of game 1488898 still brings me to the url
http://www.trmph.com/dnb/board#5,e10c9d8c1a8d10

If you work with IE, and come back to a page with similar URL, you should always before clear the cache (remove Temporary Internet Files) as it is still quite buggy, anything wrong with Firefox or Chrome?

Works great here, too. Chromium for Ubuntu. Great job, thanks!

May I suggest that the box count is shown somewhere? Now I have to count the boxes manually :)

Also in favor of Marius' suggestion of the wccanard notation. It's the one I'm used to at least :)

The "wccanard" notation (actually jijbent notation I think) is certainly the best, agreed.

I will also second Marius's suggestion of wcccanard's suggestion of jijbent notation. I had intended to suggest using wccannard's notation, but hadn't gotten around to looking up which forum topic it first came up in. Now I see it's http://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/forum/topic2.jsp?forum=110&topic=84.

Okay, I've implemented the unanimously preferred wccanard's notation system, added box counters, and figured out a way to work around a nasty IE8 bug. Please check out the new version at http://www.trmph.com/dnb/board and let me know if it works for you.

In a future release, I'll make it even easier to import games from LG. Another thing I plan to improve is the move list. Clicking on a move button should not delete anything from the list.

Nice job, I like the counter too!

Thanks for the updates!

Just tried on Chrome for Android (Samsung tab 2). Works great!

got the game right now...

thanks for all the trouble...

This is getting really good :)

I've revamped the move navigation interface with support for shortcut keys. Check out the new version at http://www.trmph.com/dnb/board. You may now also bookmark a page for future review without having to retype the LG game id. For example, http://www.trmph.com/dnb/game/lg-1488898.

Again, I need your feedback, especially for this release as I've ported the frontend code to TypeScript -- a new language I'd never used before.

When I import a game now, it comes in a new tab. Why is that? i liked it better then it loaded in the same window.

It is nearly perfect. I like the interface.

There is a small bug when you click on the list on non-contiguous moves, the colour of previously displayed move is not erased... as it is not the previous move in the list.

Wow, this really look great! Maybe it could still be improved by making the progress bar on the right follow the move displayed while we navigate through the game with the keys.

Thanks for the excellent feedback! Please reload the page to see the new version.

@Thnikkaman: Fixed.

@Carroll: Good catch! Fixed.

@eobllor: Done. The move list now automatically scrolls.

Really nice. Another small detail: when the page is first loaded (e. g. by clicking on your link above towards http://www.trmph.com/dnb/board#5,), the default value for the field game-id is '(game id)'; thus one has to erase this value before entering the id of a game. Was that necessary because IE doesn't support the placeholder attribute?

Really nice, thank you!

It can't import one of my games... this is what I get:
!http://img547.imageshack.us/img547/4871/cantimport.png!

Works for all of my other games. Great tool!

It must be because of Loïc's special character in his first name...

@eobllor: In the latest version I just uploaded, the game id field is automatically cleared when it gets focused. You may also press the Enter key there to load a game.

@Promiscuity: Fixed! Thanks for the bug report.

@Carroll: You're right. I assumed that LG encodes game records in UTF-8, but it's actually in ISO-8859-1.

Seems perfect to me now, thanks for such a great work.

Hm, be it said, one might want the coordinates to be displayed, but that doesn't seem essential.

Oh, sorry, again I have written too fast, I had forgotten that they were displayed when the mouse goes over the board. Then, perfect!