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Cyber Monday giveaway free Visio Chess

Earlier today, I gave away checkers for Visio (see Cyber Monday free #Visio Checkers! ) , and now this article completes my Cyber Monday freebies with a downloadable chess set for Visio!


This version of the chess/checker board requires connection points (Type = 2 – Inward/Outward) on each of the 64 squares, an, as before, I have styled the pieces with Bevel and Shadow. However, this time I have used my own tool for converting the XAML from Syncfusion’s Metro Studio library into true Visio shapes. This library is great ( see Metro Studio ) but it does not create true Visio shapes. In addition, I have enabled many different configuration options within Visio, such as background shape choice.

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Cyber Monday free Visio Checkers!

As it is Cyber Monday, I thought I would give away a compelling checkers board for Visio! In the UK, we call it Draughts, but the rules are the same… in my last post, I showed how to create a chess/checkers/draughts board, and in this one I add some checkers that can glue to the dark squares only!

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What is the minimum number of rectangles in a Visio chessboard?

This may sound like a simple question with a definite answer, but I think it is worthy of further explanation. I wanted to make a chessboard shape with as few lines as possible, because it makes the shape more efficient and easy to work with. Some might consider grouping 64 squares together, but that would be a very heavy shape. A chessboard needs to appear to have 64 squares, but the following shape only has 9 rectangles … How is this possible?

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Get Scrabbled with Visio

Last day of 2014, and the last of my word and number games in Visio … this is Scrabbled, which is a trainer for Scrabble. Okay, it was too difficult to do a fully working Scrabble board without code, and I was likely to break copyright if I did, so I invented a game with the Scrabble tile rack.

I have some suggested rules, but you can make your own up … I just wanted to see what I could do with just ShapeSheet functions..

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A Visio Countdown to Xmas

I presented a Visio deck of cards in a previous post ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2014/12/03/a-visio-deck-of-cards/ ), and now I present a real game that can be played with Visio over the holiday season. Countdown is a British TV programme with word and number puzzles. It was the first programme to be aired on Channel 4, and 70 series have been broadcast since its debut on 2 November 1982. With over 6,000 episodes, Countdown is one of the longest-running game shows in the world, along with the original French version, Des chiffres et des lettres, which has been running on French television continuously since 1965. Read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countdown_%28game_show%29.

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A Visio Deck of Cards

Sometimes I try ideas out in Visio without a specific goal in mind, and I have been creating a Visio deck of cards recently, so I thought I would share it. In fact, I have only created one card but it is capable of being any card in the deck by changing its shape data! I can even get a randomly generated card … all without any code except for formulas in the ShapeSheet.

Firstly, I used four icons for hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades, from my set of metro icons stencils ( see http://blog.bvisual.net/2012/11/20/announcing-metro-icons-and-a-windows-app-tile-shape-for-visio/ ). I decided to keep the icons for the suits separate, with four per suit, but linked their visibility to a Suit Shape Data fixed list row. I also displayed the Value Shape Data as the text of each icon.

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I added a Face Up Shape Data row so that the suit and value are hidden by the Microsoft Office logo.

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