board games

I'm a beginner chess player and I found the tutorials and the drills really well done. Infact I find the whole "Classroom" section of Chessmaster 9000 really well done: it guides you from the very basics to advanced techniques with clear and interesting lesson, complete with "voice acting" which makes things even easier to follow. As far as the playing engine goes, I can't tell anything useful as I'm just a beginner, but I'm sure that it's more than enough to help any player to develop his playing from beginner level to advanced as he tries what learned in the lessons. The screen is a bit cramped at 1024*768 (though it's ok enough if you use small 2D boards) but it looks as it would look perfect at 1280x1024 (which sadly I can't try). All in all I find it an excellent beginners tool and to me the "Classroom" is worth the price of admission alone. A final note: though officialy "unsupported", it works fine on my Windows 2000 PC.

I recently bought the Chessmaster 9000. The last program I had before it was the Chessmaster 2100. Let me say that I'm impressed. I'm a Class A player (1800-1999) and I enjoy this program. The Chessmaster is an extremely tough opponents. It even beat US Champion Larry Christiansen in a 6 game match. It's divided up into several sections.....

Tournament Room:
You play "rated" games or hold mock tournaments. There at least 50-100 different "personalities" that you can play against... different "people" that prefer different openings or style of play. This can be interesting to play against different styles and different levels. The downside to this is that the poorer moves they make is not typical of how a poorer human would play. Typically, you might push a pawn to attack a piece and the computer progam of "1400 rating" may leave it hanging. A real player rated 1400 does not make such dumb obvious misses. The tournament is nice but after you play your game, you have to sit and watch all the other games. Boring. You can play in 2D or 3D. However, even after a patch installed, it still crashes when I switch to 2D mode, though the 3D is much better than in CM 2100.

Game Room:
Allow you to play unofficial games against any personality or yourself. You can see what the Chessmaster is thinking the best line should be and what the "score" of the game is. Two of the better features are the "find the best move" and "analyze game." The "find the best move" will sit an analyze for a specified time, then play out the best sequence of moves, with audio, showing what the best line is. The "analyze game" spends a specified amount of time analyze a game and it will tell you what moves it agreed with, what moves you missed, if you missed a mate, etc. I use it to evaluate real games I have played in tournaments. It's almost like having a master go over your games with you. This is a very good tool.

Classroom:
This is a great feature. You have many tutorials and drills for beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. These include annotated games, chess puzzles, finding mate, checking mating with given pieces and annotated games. Whatever level you are at, you can learn something from it. Then you have session called "Josh." Josh Waitzkin is a International Master and subject of the move "Searching for Bobby Fischer." Josh has audio sections of annotated games, endgame examples, and psychological aspect of competition. This is a nice section, because you can sit back, watch and learn. The pieces move, a human talks, and I've learned a bunch from it. It is more geared to intermediate-advanced players. I can sit back at watch instead of having a board and book and having to mull through variations... instead its played out for me.

Library and Database:
The library and the database has a bunch of stored games and opening book for reference. I haven't spent much time here.

This is 5 star program that almost gets a star knocked off for a couple bugs (It also crashes if you switch profiles.). With the program, the database, and the learning tools, all for $30, you can't go wrong.

I think this is the best chess program. There are more Josh games and more classic games which is in the library. There are it's just like chessmaster 8000 it's just that chessmaster 9000 has more stuff.