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Chess Mazes v.1.1
Benefit 
Chess Mazes is the fourth program in the Chess Puzzles Series.
With its help you will learn how to plan your actions many moves in advance, to
conduct highly complicated manouvering with your pieces, to transfer them safely
from certain squares to other, more convenient points on the chessboard.
Does
a chess player really need that expertise? Well, in the course of any chess game
players have to perform such operations many times. And very often the success of
the whole encounter hinges on the accuracy and swiftness of these actions.
But this program does more than train chess playing skill. It is also meant to
develop - little by little, without you even noticing it as you play the games -
your intellectual faculties: combinatory thinking, operative memory, ability to
focus your attention and take decisions under conditions of time deficiency.
Game Rules
By its nature the game resembles a maze through which the optimum way has to be
found as quickly as possible. But the maze is not presented graphically, its
'air-castle' walls being shaped by squares guarded by enemy pieces. Your task is
to transfer your single piece from the square it occupies in the initial position
to a target square designated by a special symbol. But you have to do it without
getting assailed by pieces of the other side (the PC).
You are to choose the
colour of your piece and, accordingly, the opponent's pieces. Making moves on
the board is also up to you alone. The PC's pieces just stand there motionless
waiting for their moment to come... But when your piece has carelessly stepped on
a square aimed at by a unit of the opponent the program will immediately capture
it, and that will mean you have lost. But if you manage to reach the desired
square within the allotted time interval and in no more than 70 moves, the
victory is yours.
As soon as you hit the target, place your piece on a losing
square, or exceed the limit of moves, the program displays an appropriate message
on the screen - one of congratulation or sympathy. Along with this message you
will be informed about the distance you have covered and the length of the shortest
possible route. Both routes - yours and the theoretically shortest one -
will be demonstrated on the chessboard by means of a curved line with dots on the
squares your piece stepped on/should have stepped on. In case you do not enter
your answer in time, if you exceed the time limit, the program will act in an
analogous way.
There may be several solutions to a task, i.e. several routes leading to the
target square through the maze. On order to win you only need to demonstrate any
one of them. However, the number of points you get for your victory (when you
lose you score no points) will depend on how close the route you have proposed is
to the optimum one: if you have discovered the shortest route you get the most
points. Therefore do not try to capture all of the opponent's pieces hastily. If
an enemy unit is unprotected then you can naturally eliminate it. But that will
probably make your route much longer than the optimum one.
Features
The game has two modes: Play and Training. Play mode incorporates 7 levels of
difficulty. The difficulty of a particular task is determined by the number of
enemy pieces and the time interval in which you must cope with the task. The more
pieces are on the board, the more complicated is the maze.
All playing tasks are
newly generated by the program, their number being virtually unlimited and the
possibility of encountering the same situation twice practically equalling zero.
For each task you have coped with the program gives you a certain number of
points. The higher the difficulty level, the more points you get.
To unlock all the features you must register.
Example
Here is an example of the game (6th level of dificulty). Try to solve it!
What is the best route to transfer your white knight from d8 to c6? Finding the
shortest path will not suffice; in addition, the piece's journey has to be safe.
Indeed, the enemy men stay awake... Small hint: the shortest route - 23 moves!
Download the latest version
(1.1, November 11, 1998)
Chess Mazes © 1999
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