My boys were given the white pieces and I removed six of my starting pieces (both rooks, bishops, and knights). Thus armed, I played at my best against two newcomers to the game. The Engineer made me work for it, making me proud by going on the offensive immediately, but I won two games each against both him and his brother, the Attorney. Both took their first loss well, but were not happy with their second defeat.
So I told them that the next time I played them, I would try something different. Yesterday, I played each of them another game. As before, they played white with all of their pieces. This time I started with two knights (no queen, rooks, or bishops). Despite losing his queen early, the Engineer surprised both of us by checkmating me after about forty moves. The Attorney tried a different tactic. Figuring he had many more pieces than I, he simply tried to attack whenever possible, hoping I would run out of pieces. It was a viable strategy, but the Attorney lacked the experience to execute it properly. He has not yet mastered the concept of guarding all his pieces, so his strategy failed. Yet, he took this defeat in good spirits. I think I'll stick with this level of handicapping until one of the boys manages to beat me twice in a row. At which point, I'll try something different. I wonder how long it will take for them to work up to playing without any handicaps. Probably sooner than I think.
When I was in college, I found a fun chess program called Battle Chess. I just rediscovered it on the internet. It appears to now be in the public domain and you can download it for free along with another version which I never played. I may see if I can get it to work later. The graphics are a lot of fun as the computer shows an animated battle each time you capture a piece.
Ah, Archon. That brings back memories. My brother and I spent way too many hours playing it on our Atari 800 when it was new.
I've never tried Arcon Ultra, but I found a place to download it for free. The site also has Archon as well.
I learned how to play chess at the age of 6, but I struggled with the best way to teach it to my own kids when they were young. I like your method and I guess I'll have to try that the next time I get a chance.
-jim.
My Dad taught me the basics of chess when I was three, and I always loved the game. Then when I was nine I mastered such arcana as castling, and capturing a pawn en passant, and for many years I was an avid chess player. Haven't played now in a number of years, largely because I don't know anyone else in my present locale who plays chess.
As for computer chess, I remember playing Sargon III ("requires DOS 2.1 or higher") on my very first computer, with glowing green Hercules monochrome monitor. Nowadays I occasionally play against my computer running gnome-chess as a very minimalistic graphical front end for the gnuchess chess engine. The computer always wins.
My wife and I have no children of our own, but we do have a couple we consider near and dear to our hearts.
One of these — Harrison (5) — is really into computer games. (He has his own computer — an outdated 300mhz Pentium.) I had a bunch of Lego-brand games I'd purchased a while back, and I gave him Lego Chess.
He loves it. Much like Battle Chess, there are animations when the pieces encounter each other. There are all sorts of training modes, and various skill levels, and the computer can be set to "truly infinitely stupid." (As in: Harrison's bishop is sitting next to the computer's queen on the back rank and the computer makes a pawn move instead!)
What I'm saying is this: if you have a computer that your kids can access (and since they play Rollercoast Tycoon, I'm assuming they do), see if you can find a cheap copy of Lego Chess (probably $5 on eBay). They'll probably love it.
Thanks for the suggestion. I'll see if I can buy a copy.
My kids use an older system similar to Harrison's machine and they already like Lego software. So this sounds perfect.
You need to try Archon. It is quite similar to chess (various peices with restricted moves) but rather than just showing an animation of the battle, Archon acually makes you fight out each battle.
Its great fun to kill you opponent's Dragon with your lowly Knight!
The game was originally released for the 8-bit market (I had it for the Atari 800XL) but the newest version (Archon Ultra) is playable on a PC.
It is quite difficult to find, however.