A web service to return an svg file for a given board game given the url as the board state for the following game types:

• Chess
• Sudoku

The service is implemented in F# using Saturn and Giraffe, and is hosted live on Azure at https://gameboardservice.azurewebsites.net/<game-type>/<board-state>.svg.

The chess URL uses the Forsyth–Edwards Notation where White pieces are designated using upper-case letters ("PNBRQK") while black pieces use lowercase ("pnbrqk"). Empty squares are noted using digits 1 through 8 (the number of empty squares), and "/" separates ranks. The ranks are ordered from 8 to 1 (top to bottom) in the URL:

/chess/<rank8>/<rank7>/<rank6>/<rank5>/<rank4>/<rank3>/<rank2>/<rank1>.svg

e.g.

/chess/rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR.svg
/chess/r1bq3k/pp2bp1r/2n1p2B/2pnP3/3P4/2PB1N1Q/PP4P1/RN3RK1.svg

Originally this used the Unicode symbols for chess pieces but they varied so much in quality and metrics across all the platforms that embedding SVG definitions of each of the chess pieces was the best way to get a consistent rendering between platforms. Also when an SVG is used as an IMG in HTML external references to fonts are ignored for security reasons making it always use the system font.

The SVG Chess Pieces were created by jurgenwesterhof (adapted from work of Cburdett) CC BY-SA 3.0 and taken from wikimedia.org. The SVG was then minified and hand optimized turning attributes into class names to reduce the size further.

/sudoku/<81 characters>.svg

Specify the <81 characters> in the URL corresponsing to the 9x9 grid of the sudoku puzzle. Blanks squares can be represented as space (' '), zero ('0') or period ('.').

e.g.

/sudoku/7..25..98..6....1....61.3..9....1.......8.4.9..75.28.1.94..3.......4923.61.....4..svg
/sudoku/004200030002104005160900000835000060000000000040000378000007019500602700090003200.svg

Here are some more examples.

Also see my SudokuSolver repository for more test cases that use this service in the README.md file.