Star Wars Chess

It was a time when I had paper figurines from cereal boxes stacked next to my monitor and a copy of DOS saved on a floppy disk. Someone in 1993 came up with an idea: let's take chess, stuff Star Wars into it, and make Darth Vader knock C-3PO to the ground with animated pomp. And you know what? It worked.

Star Wars Chess is exactly what the title promises — a chess game set in the Star Wars universe. The light side plays against the dark side, each piece corresponds to its chess counterpart, and before you get tired of guessing the assignment, the game shows it to you itself. The "platformer" genre in the database is at least an original classification — it's chess. Classic chess, nothing more, nothing less.

The core is pure chess logic without major hiccups. You move pieces across a standard chessboard, the computer thinks in several difficulty levels, and nothing about it breaks the thousand-year-old rules framework. But the heart of the whole experience is the animated battles: every time one piece captures another, a short 3D animation plays. The first ten are great. After the fiftieth, you start wondering if there's a way to turn them off. There is, and that was the right call by the developers.

Software Toolworks knew what it was selling — a license. The chess engine isn't exactly Deep Blue, but it can give a beginner a run for their money on higher difficulties. What keeps the game in memory is precisely that audiovisual layer: digitized sounds, music from the soundtrack, pieces modeled so they'd be recognizable even on hardware of the time. On a 486 with a VGA card, it looked decent. Today it looks like an early 3D polygon crisis, but with a nostalgic coat of paint.

It aged the way you'd expect. The animations are now more of a cute artifact than a spectacle, and you'd crush the AI opponent with modern chess programs in an afternoon. But for a Star Wars fan or casual chess player who wants some atmosphere from a galaxy far, far away with their game, it's still a functional package. You can get it running in a browser via DOSBox emulators without much fuss and finish a game in an hour. The game never tried to be anything more than that.