Chess

Question: Is chess the greatest board game ever? Answer: Yes, yes it is. :-) A little over a year ago I posted scans of an old 1980s chess program, called Sargon III, to my Commodore 64 web site. Reading through that manual again got me thinking about my all-time favorite game. I learned to play chess when I was pretty young (< 10, I think?) because I was so fascinated by the chess pieces and how they moved on the board. My mother taught me how to play, and we enjoyed many rounds of the beautiful game. (Sorry soccer fans!) It is so easy to play chess now-a-days, what with the plethora of online and app versions available. This is a much better world for casual chess players than it was in the early 1980s, when my only option was playing a game in person, with one of the handful of chess playing people I knew. Back then, when I first got the Sargon III game, I was elated to be able to play chess whenever I wanted, and at varying degrees of difficulty. I quickly found that I needed to…