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'El Juego de las Amazonas', from Walter Zamkaukas, is one of the best
territorial games I have seen, it is interesting, deep, nice, and with an
impressive simplicity of ideas involved. But it is a complex game, it is
not an easy matter the construction of a good computer player (Try with
Zillions and see how it plays!). Strictly speaking, Amazons is not a Chess
game, but it is a very good abstract game that appears in TCVP as guest, I
think because it has some elements of Chess. I like this game. Maybe I´ll
prepare a Courier Preset for this game (or a variant...)
Variants?: It is easy imagine a lot of them, some of them as near to chess
as you want. Any interesting Ideas?.

I don´t know how many users and members of TCVP have played this great
game. I have only seen at brainking.com that Andreas has been an active
Amazons player, with a good performance. The best rated Amazons player at
brainking is Grim Reaper (Ed Trice)
Total score: 269 wins, 17 draws, 0 losses.
Impressively good score.

If you are interested in this popular territorial game and you are
encouraged to try a very strong opponent, I suggest the AMAZONG Java
applet that you can find at: jenslieberum.de/amazong/amazong.html 
AMAZONG is perhasp the strongest program playing Amazons now,
nevertheless, it can be beated by humans, I have won a couple of times
(but I have lost at least ten games against it). I think AMAZONG, under
conventional time controls, plays at a level equivalent to 2400-2500
rating, translating it to Chess ELO, but the Java applet only uses a few
seconds for each move, so the level is a bit lower, although it is strong
enough, I believe not less than 2200. Try it!.

This game reminds me of an old chessboard puzzle involving the placing of a number of queens, to solve a certain task, but of course Amazons is something even more complex, in that it is a full-fledged game. It also seems almost simple at first sight, deceptively so.