
	W-Chess (w) 1996 by Eero Tamminen


This is a Chess client for W window system / W toolkit / my GameFrame.


FOR STARTERS

Before starting a game one has to contact another game client.  This
happens either by setting up a server and accepting a connection or by
connecting yourself to another game server. Both of these can be done
from the dialog behind the 'Connect' button.

After connecting another player, you can start the game and begin to
play.  Note that continuing asks confirmation from the other player
for the current board setup before proceeding.


CHESS RULES

At the start players' pieces occupy two rows at the both sides of the
board. There are six different types of pieces (from left to right,
top to bottom on screen):

Rook:
Moves horizontally or vertically.

Knight:
Moves two squares forward and one aside horizontally or vertically.
This is the only piece that may jump over other pieces.

Bishop:
Moves diagonally.

Queen:
Moves either horizontally, vertically or diagonally.

King:
The most important piece in the game.  Moves one square to any
direction.  If king and the rook on the side where king is moving,
haven't been moved yet and there are no other pieces between them and
none of the squares involved are threatened, king may also 'fortificate'
by moving two squares to either side.  The rook will jump over king to a
square beside it.

Pawn:
Can move only one square forward.  Can capture only by moving one square
diagonally forward.  Though at the first move, the piece can move two
squares forward.  However, such a piece can be captured by another pawn
from the square where it would have been if it would have moved only one
square forward, if that is done immediately.  Capturing 'in passing' is
called 'en passant' move.  If pawn reaches the other side of the board,
it will be immediately promoted to either queen, tower, bishop or knight
as player selects.


None of the pieces except knight may jump over own or opponent's pieces.
Capturing happens when piece is moved to square already occupied by a
piece of another color.  The captured piece is removed from the board.

If king is threatened with capturing, only valid move is one that will
remove the threat.  If there isn't such a move, the game is lost.  The
threatening of the king is called 'checking' and capture of opponent's
king is called chess-mate (victory).  If king isn't 'checked' but all the
moves would lead to to king being threatened the game will be even.
That is called 'stalemate'.


CHESS STRATEGY FOR BEGINNERS

Chess books have devoted many pages for standard game openings.  These
involve occupying the own half of the board (mostly with pawns covered
by the knights) so that one has space for attacks and defense (remember
that pawns can move only forward and other pieces behind them can't jump
over them in defense of their king).  In defense it's important that low
valued pieces are on the front line (so that damages (=pawns) won't be
too high on case of attack) and that pieces cover each other so that
attacks can be cut off as soon as possible.

Attacks should be done so that (attacking) pieces cover each other.  Aim
will be either to capture higher ranking pieces than the attackers
(forking, threatening more than one piece at the time, is good tactics)
or to disrupt the opponent's defense line(s) open to further attack.  And
of course the capture of the opposing king is the ultimate, overriding
objective.


THANKS

For Warwick Allison for allowing me to include the images from his
Gnu Chess GEM port.  I'd like to thank Warwick here for doing a lot of
other freeware / GPL programs too (he has also done most of the images
in the NetHack v3.2 and is nowadays programming on Linux with G++ :)).


TODO

Convert Gnu Chess to a GameFrame server.  I'm not myself interested as
I don't play chess, but maybe somebody else might pick up that project?


24th of September,

	Eero Tamminen		http://www.modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~puujalka/

