Chess Miner

by Aleksey Bartashnikov

Chess Miner is a chess training computer game. Below you will find a short description of the game.

Aim of the Game

Only white pieces are involved in the game (officers, but no pawns!). The computer makes moves with them. You are the miner, and only mines are at your disposal. A move by the program consists in a single shift of a piece along a certain route. Your move consists in the placing of a mine. Moves by both playing sides alternate. Yours is always the first one.

Your aim is to "undermine" all white pieces by means of the mines. You have to discover what route each piece follows and then place mines on each square of that route. A route is a certain sequence of squares along which a piece moves, obeying the rules of the "big" game of chess as it does so. The length of a route, i.e. the number of squares it consists of, varies from 1 to 5. The number of pieces also ranges between 1 and 5; the length of their circuits may be different.

Unless undermined, a piece always travels along a route twice. Lap No. 1 "outlines" the circuit; lap No. 2 serves to prompt the human player to mark the whole extent of the route by mines, starting on the square where the piece is currently standing. A piece is regarded to have been undermined, and vanishes from the board, if on each square of its current route it steps on a mine. As soon as you have eliminated the last piece, you win. If you have failed to undermine a piece in due time, the chessman changes the route. As soon as any piece has reached the end of its third route for the second time, you lose.

Features

The game has two modes: Play and Training. Play mode incorporates 10 levels of difficulty. The difficulty of a given task depends on the number of pieces involved and on the length of route of each piece. The more pieces are present and the longer their routes, the harder is the user's task. All tasks are generated by the program. The number of possible positions is practically infinite, therefore the possibility of a position being encountered twice is in the vicinity of zero. For each task you have coped with the program gives you a certain number of points. The higher the difficulty level, the more points you get.

The main window of the program looks like this:

Chess Miner is intended to improve one's concentration, memory, spatial imagination, and the skill to discover regularities. It also helps consolidate one's knowledge about chess pieces and their possible motions about the chessboard.

More detail description of the game and the possibility to download an evaluation copy of the game you will find at the Chess Puzzles Series site http://www.bartsoft.com/chesspuzzles/.

Chess Miner is sold by several companies through the Internet for $15. Here is the link where you can download evaluation copy of the program:

http://www.bartsoft.com/chesspuzzles/miner.htm