Chess++ Reviews

Really glad to see this project; especially as the website Jocly is no longer available which used to provide different chess variants to play against the AI or with another player. Chess++ is already good by providing Raumschach in it's original German format of 1907 which was designed to represent the recent innovation of flight and its use within modern warfare. The AI is difficult on hard but it would be good to have more difficulty options as easy may be too easy for some players. I would also like to see some alternate display options for the board; although I think the cubic format is effective I think personally I prefer to have 5 flat boards placed ontop of each other without vertical lines interlinking them because I found this made it more difficult to see through the board when viewing from the side. The best idea I think would be to be able to toggle different guidelines on and off at will. I really look forward to the Chess++ progressing and expanding to include new variants: Some variants I would really like to see included in order of preference are: 1) Hexagonal Chess - which has 3 board colours and thus 3 different bishops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagonal_chess 2) Star Trek's Tri-Dimensional Chess - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-dimensional_chess#Star_Trek_Tri-Dimensional_Chess 3) Hnefatafl - Nordic chess like asymmetrical board game about the king escaping an ambush: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafl_games 4) Shogi - Japanese variant of chess with more versatile movement options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shogi 5) Kriegspiel Chess - where you cannot see your opponents pieces and their location must be inferred https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegspiel_(chess) 6) Fischer Random Chess - where starting position is randomly selected from 960 possible options: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer_random_chess 7) Customizable option to create your own chess variant e.g. victory conditions, pieces number/type, starting position, board size, difficulty etc.

"Raumschach (German for Space Chess) is one of the first three-dimensional chess variants and the first to survive until present times. It was invented by Herr Doktor Ferdinand Maack in 1907. Maack first experimented with an 8x8x8 array but later determined that a 5x5x5 array yields a nicer game. Maack founded a Raumschach club in Hamburg in 1919, which remained active until the Second World War." Not bad, but needs better camera controls. After all, rotating the camera around the board is more important than rotating the camera itself or moving it in a plane.