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Dabbaba

Dabbaba is a program written by Jens Baek Nielsen from Denmark. The program is a fully functional program, and the author does not ask you to send him money for using his program (so, while he keeps the copyrights on his program, use for personal purposes is free.)

Dabbaba is a program that plays chess against you. Additionally, it can also play several chess variants. The graphics and interface of the program fulfill their purposes, but are not very fancy. Nice points of Dabbaba are not only its price (as it is free), but also its options, like the chess variants it plays.

The chess variants, played by Dabbaba are:

  1. Stationary Chess. The king cannot move; castling is forbidden.
  2. Knightmate Chess. The knights are replaced with kings, and the king is replaced with a knight. The goal is to mate the knight; there is no castling.
  3. Chancellor Chess. The queen has the combined moves of rook and knight. This is called Almost Chess by original inventor of this chess variant Ralph Betza.
  4. Archbishop Chess (Janus Chess). The queen has the combined moves of bishop and knight.
  5. Nightrider Chess. Knights are nightriders: they can continue to make knight moves in one turn when going in the same direction, but may capture only after the last standard knight move.
  6. Some variants where knights have additional possibilities: these are types of Augmented Knights, as in Betza's Chess Variant.
  7. Grid chess.
  8. Rooksquare chess.
  9. Pawnfreeze chess.
Dabbaba has played 8 games against two Danish players both with a danish rating of 2000. It was at the level 'game in 15 minutes'; Dabbaba only got 8 minutes giving the operator time to transfer the moves. Dabbaba ran on a Pentium II 233 Mhz and won 5-3 (4-4 had been more fair).

For comments, you can write to:

Jens B‘k Nielsen
Daltoften 15
8600 Silkeborg
Denmark

Or see the information page of Jens Bæk Nielsen on chessvariants.com.


Written by Hans Bodlaender.
WWW page created on April 2, 1997. Last modified: February 3, 2003.