Chess-muster JIVE

Yesterday I ran to the gym but wasn't really feeling the groove. I felt it OK, I guess. I spent a lot of the early afternoon playing Assassin's Creed 2 collecting more stuff and upgrading my dude and playing some Chessmaster LIVE.

I learned how to play Chess in grade school and I thought it was fine. It was a part of the TAG (Talented and Gifted) program, so it was a nice to be able to go to a special room in the middle of the day to play games. But I wasn't enamored or anything.

My experience playing Clue on Christmas Eve with Chris S and Isara showed me that games change with time. What I thought was a simple game of moving around the board making guesses and doing detective work as a kid, was actually a game of trickery and deception as an adult. As a kid, I played my hand, as an adult, I played my opponents.

That, combined with the awesome job XBLA developers have done creating video game adaptations of boardgames (like Carcassonne, Catan, Ticket to Ride, Magic the Gathering, etc...). Specifically I appreciate the fact that the digital versions of these games eliminate the need for the expensive boxed versions, the hassle of setting up, the job of scoring and, best of all, the need for having 1-3 other people in the room just to get a game going.


So I figured now was a good time to relearn it. And I was right. It's fun and within 3 moves I was like "Wow, there are infinitely more factors and decisions to work with than I remember."

Right now I suck. Completely. The game has a hundred or more profiles of opponents, from beginner to expert, from aggressive to overvaluing Queens. It gives each opponent an Elo rating (the relative skill level) from 1 to 2,700+ and features a portrait to match. The highest ranked character is a wise old wizard dude. I'm playing babies and monkeys. And I don't always win.

But that's why I picked it up; to learn. Someday I hope to be a young, fresh and astute Asian teen.