Battle Chess Enhanced

Every move counts. In Battle Chess Enhanced, chess is played like on a real board — the pieces go at each other tooth and nail. When a rook takes a pawn, it really takes it, with an animation that would crack you up if you were looking for laughs in the eighties.

It's chess with a travel bag on its side. A logic game from the ground up, where chess players have one sole mission: to play through a match by the rules, as if they were sitting in a café by the window. The Enhanced version from 1992 on DOS added graphics and theater — the pieces aren't just symbols, but miniature soldiers, monsters and archers who beat each other up when they meet. There's not that much extra logic in it, more like animated decoration around something that's been working unchanged for a thousand years.

Playing is whisking the mouse across the board. You move a piece, the computer takes its time to respond. The graphics of those animations were decent for the time — there's sarcasm in them, as if your pieces really hated each other. On a DOS PC it looked interesting, smooth movements and colors that would look like a marketplace poster in today's 3D graphics. Controls are simple, just click, nothing complicated.

Battle Chess Enhanced is a record of one idea that has its place: when you're bored with plain old chess and want an experience with a hint of spectacle. In the nineties it was a riot — watching the pieces explain their point of view through animations. These days it feels like a historical relic that survived from when a computer was a black box with green text and every animation was a contribution to the cinema.

It's worth playing if you want to go back to childhood days at an older computer or try how chess was made more fun. It runs in the browser without compromise — it's about what happened to a video game that had one simple ambition: to make the oldest game in the world a little bit more theatrical. And it pulled it off, if you were born before the internet was born.