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Grand Chess  1997

When Zillions Development created their universal gaming engine, the first commercial game they created with it was Grand Chess, a Zillions of Games implementation of a chess variant that was created in 1984 by Christian Freeling. Grand Chess was deemed to be a better test of the engine than traditional chess because the much larger board and greater number of pieces create more legal moves than a normal game of chess. Grand Chess is played on a 10×10 board (100 positions vs. 64 in chess). Each side gets two extra pawns and two extra pieces: a Marshall (a combination Rook-Knight) and a Cardinal (combination Bishop-Knight). The opposing armies are still the same distance from each other as in chess: the extra two "ranks" are placed behind the pieces, leaving the first and tenth ranks blank, except for the presence of the rooks. The empty rank is designed to allow the rooks to move to the center immediately, instead of having to wait for the bishops and knights to develop (an even lengthier process when the two new pieces are added, such as in Capablanca Chess). Pawns can now optionally promote upon reaching the opponent's pawn rank or piece rank, and must promote upon reaching the final rank, but they can only promote to a piece that has previously been captured. If no piece is available, a pawn on the 9th rank cannot move, but can still give check to the King on the 10th rank. Zillions Grand Chess is clearly based on the Zillions engine, and features the familiar smiley face who is happy when winning and sad when losing, and the animated brain when the computer is thinking. The shareware demo can only be played for 15 minutes or 25 moves, although the moves aren't counted when the computer plays against itself.

Added by DOSGuy

Screenshots

Win9x
GDI

Screenshot of Grand Chess

Downloads

Grand Chess v1.2 Demo (841,728 bytes) 1998-04-02 Win9x
Grand Chess v1.11 (Still searching) 1997-11-30 Win9x
Grand Chess v1.1 (Still searching) 1997-11-25 Win9x
Grand Chess v1.0 (Still searching) 1997-10-22 Win9x

Availability

Zillions Development no longer sells this game.