Zillions of Games

I read a story about a city-sized human chess game and that got me to thinking about that old chess variants page I used to look at in college, back when w_b_yeats and I would play the occasional game. We didn't try many of the variants ourselves, except for some of the one-dimensional variants.

It's been years since I last visited, so I was surprised to find out that many of the variants could be played on your computer with the Zillions of Games board game engine -- against the computer, over the Internet, whatever.

These variants look particularly interesting:

• Anti-King Chess: you have not only a King to protect, but an Anti-King which is in check only when it is NOT being attacked! You lose if either piece is checkmated.
• Deep Blue vs Kasparov: a variant meant to memorialize the famous game in which Deep Blue compelled Kasparov to resign after just a few moves. This is the one game that w_b_yeats and I printed out and played out at a local coffee shop.
• Quantum Chess: The pieces move the same, except for some special rule about observed versus unobserved spaces. I'll have to play with it a little to see how exactly that works.

When I get home, I'm definitely going to have to play around with this. Zillions of Games also plays Go, Reversi, and just about any sort of board game. And you can even design your own.

But first, it's off to Bandersnatch with jecook!

(incidentally, nobody lists zillions of games as an interest.