WeaponizedChess

New Version Available 2/12/18:Windows, fully animated graphics, online multiplayer with your Steam Friends

Weaponized Chess = chess + weapons

WeaponizedChess is like regular chess but in 3-D with weapons and stealth.

WeaponizedChess is derived from regular chess but makes many changes. It adds weapons, three-dimensionality, and tunable stealth. It is a more modern version of chess. Old chess is about knights capturing kings. Modern war is not like that at all. WeaponizedChess is about stealthy, weapon-armed pieces contending on a modern battlefield. Have no fear, the basic nature of chess is retained: black-and-white checkerboard, one side moves then the other, defeating the enemy king is still the goal.

WeaponizedChess is also an experiment in creating a game where a human player will always have an advantage over the artificial-intelligence player. This is achieved by deliberately and radically increasing the exponential burden of a computer player but in a way that any human can naturally handle. Humans will always be better guessers than computers and stealth (and other features of the game) ensheathe this nature into the game. You don't like playing chess by mail or email remotely with someone because you fear they may cheat (get advice from a chess-playing computer program)? Play this game instead. Tired of playing chess against people who have spent a lot of time building up book knowledge about chess? Play this game instead.

WeaponizedChess has an integrated board editor, a type of game notation which describes a game, a set of known popular color themes, and a set of pre-defined starting boards.

WeaponizedChess is a game for people played chess in the past but got bored with it. Did you ever look at your present position during a regular chess game and wish you could move two pieces instead of just one? In WeaponizedChess you can often move more than 1 of your pieces during your turn.

Modern conflict is heavily dependent on military technology. In WeaponizedChess there are choppers, jets, tanks, submarines, destroyers, and combat engineers whose characteristics have been translated to a chess board. Low-observable assets play a deadly game of cat and mouse with an opponent. Infantrymen use jump-packs to fly over the battlefield. Combat scuba invisibly travels under the surface to attack.

There are 2 versions available on Steam. In the Linux/SteamOS version you play against a computer opponent or against another human. Human versus human play requires both players be in the same physical room and share the computer to make moves. This version of WeaponizedChess does not provide online multi-player matchmaking. Note that a typical AI for a regular chess game is comparatively better because an army of researchers and programmers have been working for decades to achieve this result. The 2nd, newer version runs on Windows, provides fully-animated computer graphics, and allows you play a game online with your Steam friends. This version does NOT provide a computer opponent. There is only 1 package for sale. When you buy this package you get both the Windows version and the Linux/SteamOS version. If you have 45 Gigabytes and 45 minutes available you can put Linux on your Windows PC and get both the online multiplayer and AI opponent on one computer!

You might wonder "Why should I want to buy this game?" Curiosity. One reason might be because you would be interested in seeing what regular chess would be like if it was changed to include weapons. In this game you can change options to make the board pieces move very much like regular chess pieces but they will also be able to use weapons. There are many other ways to modify the game but it would take too much text to describe them all. After you modify how you want the game to play you can save your preferences. You can set the game to automatically load your preferences whenever the game starts. You can also modify and save to your preferences for how you want the game to look as opposed to how it plays. There are many videos showing what this game looks like (on YouTube) but in this Steam version there are two modifications to how the game looks. Instead of the 2 piece sets shown in the videos and web-viewable game art there are now 13 piece sets available. Also you can use a set of known "popular" color themes to change the colors of the game board and game pieces.

The AI works better if you use an i7. Both versions are strictly 64 bit. Development for this version was strictly limited to Ubuntu (the base OS for Steam development). It has been tested to run on Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 15.10. On a Steam console it is automatically hardware-accelerated. It runs in Big Picture Mode and in Desktop Mode. Use either the mouse or controller in those environments. The Windows version has been tested on Windows 10 and Windows 7.

This version of WeaponizedChess is more interested in the game being clearly displayable than in the game graphics being a spectacular example of computer animation. Those who are only interested in a game where the graphics are pure eye candy should play some other game. This game is about thinking. It is not about looking. This game is fun because you use your mind to see the pieces, to see all the possibilities. Chess has always been like that. The simple-geometric set of pieces will always be drawn quickly and clearly even if hardware acceleration is not available.

The Steam overlay cannot be used in the Linux/SteamOS version. The overlay IS present and available in the Windows vesion.

This game has been translated to many languages. The user can change the language displayed during game usage and read documentation in many languages. The game can be controlled using: English, German, Spanish, Dutch, French, Greek, Bulgarian, Turkish, Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, Danish, Polish, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, Czech, Romanian, Italian, Thai, Portuguese.

To change the display language (the language in which the commands are printed and which you read while playing the game) to English, click File->Change To Which Language. Then select English. To make this change permanent so that the game always boots to English, first click Play Change->Save Present Settings as User Preferences. This causes any changes you have made (including the change you just made to English) to be the new User Preferences. Second, click Play Change->Toggle At Start Use User-Preferences/Game-Defaults. Assuming you had not already set this toggle to user preferences, this will now cause the game to boot (whenever you DO boot) to your user preferences (and display commands in English). WeaponizedChess does not use, rely, depend on or care about your present locale. You don't have to have locales set up on your Linux, you do not need your locale already set to your preferred language.