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Captain Spalding Chess

. Find an Elephant in your Pajamas.[All Comments] [Add Comment or Rating]

M. Howe wrote on Sun, Aug 18, 2002 03:24 PM UTC:

The Captain Spalding ZRF runs fine for me (Win 98se) but to those who can't
run it, I'm not sure you're missing much.  Peter has certainly done a
great job writing the ZRF, and I saw no bugs or rules anomalies, but when
I told Zillions to play itself, the resulting game was tedious,
repetitive, and lackluster with nothing you could call a 'combination.' 
The boxes ran past each other toward the promotion zone, and proceeded to
drop many bats and promote them to many BOOHs.  The great elephants were
exchanged early, and the pajamas didn't last long either.  Finally, after
150 dull moves, black won.  I know that Ralph Betza has invented many
seminal chess variants and I respect him greatly, but unless what I saw
was just Zillions completely unable to cope with whatever the strategy of
this game must be, this doesn't strike me as a successful variant.