Magic Chess is a strategy game inspired by "Castle Quest", a very entertaining Nintendo Game Boy game. The original was played on boards of any size and any shape, but my derivative is played on a 7x7 chess board. (Yes, I know a classic chess board is 8x8.)
You play Magic Chess by moving your pieces around, capturing enemy pieces, and casting spells. These spells have different effects, depending on the magician. Your goal is to beat the enemy king. This can be achieved by capturing him or by killing him with a spell. This version of Magic Chess is played with the characters of "Diablo", an action RPG by Blizzard. The "king" in Magic Chess is Deckard Cain, an NPC (non-player character) of "Diablo".
Needless to say, it is important to know how the pieces can move.
If you slide your mouse over the pieces on the board,
a pop-up window will appear showing a so-called
"move indicator", apart from other information about the piece. Move indicators
look like this:
These neat little icons show how the pieces can move. The colors mean:
The second move indicator is special because it belongs to a piece that can move unlimited in the shown directions. If a piece can move unlimited, this is always indicated separately.
In Magic Chess, there is no check. That means, you can move your king (i.e. your Cain) on a square that is controlled by an enemy piece. In classic chess, this would be an illegal move. Also, castling does not exist, just as little as capturing en passant or promoting a piece on the last row.
Every piece has a specific amount of HP (hit points) and MP (magic points). If a piece wants to capture another, that piece with the higher HP will survive, but during the fight it will lose so much HP as the enemy piece had. The attacking piece gets an attack bonus of 1 HP so that the attacking piece will survive if both pieces have the same HP value.
If a piece wants to cast a spell, it needs 1 MP for doing so. If a piece has no MP left, it cannot conjure anymore.
Don't be surprised if the computer makes stupid moves. This game is rather a proof of concept than a serious attempt to write a strong AI, so its intelligence level is quite low. You should be able to beat the CPU in every match---if you aren't, please consult a doctor. Because of the extremely slow execution of PHP code, I cannot implement sufficient search depths on the web server to enable the CPU to compete with strong human players.
Magic Chess is solely based on HTML, so you don't need any plug-ins. However, to see the piece information, you must have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
IMPORTANT: It may take 0.5 to 10 seconds for the CPU player to make its move. But if you encounter an "internal server error" or the game does not respond for about 20 seconds, then the server refused to execute the game code due to overload. In this case, please wait for a short while, click the "back" button in your browser and try your move (or whatever) again.
If you want to comment about Magic Chess, please contact me in the guestbook or by e-mail (especially if you encounter any bugs)!
I had a wonderful ending of a match on 30 Jun 2007 when my opponent
honorably committed suicide when he had no chance to win the game. This is the
last screen of the game:
And this is the save code of the game's last position:
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