Chessmaster 3000 (Game)

Chessmaster 3000

GAME » on March 9, 1991

The third installment of the Chessmaster series of chess games, featuring a more customizable A.I., new training tools, and an updated multi-windowing system.

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Overview

The Chessmaster 3000 is a digital chess game developed and published by The Software Toolworks for DOS/Windows PCs and Macintosh computers in 1991.

The third installment of the Chessmaster series (after The Fidelity Chessmaster 2100 (Game)), The Chessmaster 3000 brings its chess engine and training tools to Windows while expanding on its A.I. (which can be customized to particular play styles), building on its extensive animated tutorials (which are now interactive and feature both advanced strategies and solvable chess problems), adding detailed advisories in English for showing game strategies, adding a customizable round-robin tournament mode, introducing new ways to import and export both the board and move history for use with other chess programs, adding customizable 2D and 3D chess boards, and building on the multi-window "War Room" display to make use of customizable windows. It is notable for being the last game in the series to use the original Kittinger chess engine, with all subsequent releases making use of Johan de Koning's "The King" engine.

The Windows and Mac versions also received CD-ROM releases, featuring over four hours of spoken commentary from former champion Anatoly Karpov. The game was also the basis for the 1993 licensed spin-off The Software Toolworks' Star Wars Chess.

Gameplay

A.I. Attributes

The game includes a variety of attributes for customizing A.I. players:

While the game cannot recreate the HAL 9000, it does include the match from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Material Points - Determines for each piece, including center pawns and opponent's pieces, how strongly the A.I. defends/attacks it.
Attacker vs. Defender - The balance between aggressively capturing pieces and passively avoiding exchanges.
Material vs. Positional - The balance between each piece's perceived strength and their positional attributes.
Vision - Limits how many possible moves it sees, to more simulate a human player.
Book Depth - Limits how it uses the opening book, to more simulate a human player.
Deep Thinking - Determines if the A.I. thinks as the human player plays.
Treat Draw As - Determines how to perceive draw games, either advantageously or disadvantageously.

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