Alquerque

Alquerque is a real board game — older than chess, by most accounts the ancestor of both draughts and the Madagascan game Fanorona — and this adaptation dresses it up convincingly: a parchment title screen in a proper blackletter font, knight-themed pieces, a choice of single-player against a computer opponent or local two-player, and a clean, correctly-drawn 5x5 board of connected points. The presentation earns real credit, once a missing character-encoding declaration found during installation was fixed so that styled Unicode lettering renders correctly instead of as garbled symbols.

The board never became playable, in any mode

That's where this review has to stop being generous, because the actual game was never reachable. Three separate modes were tried on a simulated phone — single-player playing Black, single-player playing White, and local multiplayer — and in every single case, not one piece on the board was ever marked as a legal move at the start of the game. Tapping pieces did nothing, tapping the board's one empty point did nothing, and no sequence of taps produced any change in board state across repeated attempts.

Before concluding this was a game bug rather than a testing mistake, it was checked directly: a live event listener was attached to the page and dumped after each tap, confirming that real touchstart, touchend, mousedown, mouseup and click events fired correctly, every time, on exactly the DOM element that was tapped — the piece's own SVG graphic, or the target cell. The input pipeline works. What never happens is the game's own logic marking any piece as selectable, which its code requires before a click on that piece does anything at all.

This is not a fluke this review stumbled into alone. The author has replied to comments on the game's own competition page at least five separate times acknowledging essentially the same family of bug, reported independently by different judges: "the gameboard did not render properly," "so many have reported the rendering issue, I need to work more on media queries," "looks like there is some lag in setTimeout due to which the pieces are moving without user click." One judge described exactly the symptom found here in different words: "it seemed to randomly interpret clicks at times, and I was not able to identify why." The author's own reply to that comment: "I never faced that... but when I found this issue the entries were closed and I couldn't recreate the scenario." In other words, this is a known, unresolved reliability problem in the exact build this shelf would be shipping, not a one-off result of this review's specific setup.

For what it's worth, the game did place respectably in the original competition's judged gameplay and controls categories (37th and 44th of the field), which suggests it worked well enough on whatever specific browser and window size the judges who scored it happened to use — but that's exactly the problem for a shelf whose entire premise is working reliably on a phone.

Final verdict

A good-looking adaptation of a genuinely interesting historical game, undermined by a real, author-acknowledged interaction bug that made it completely non-functional in every mode tested at this shelf's required phone size. This isn't a case of unclear rules or an unfamiliar mechanic — no move of any kind could be made. Not ready for this shelf.