Section 14.4. Chess

14.4. Chess

Mac OS X comes with only one game, but it's a beauty (Figure 14-4). Chess is a traditional chess game played on a gorgeously rendered board with a set of realistic 3-D pieces. The program is actually a 15-year-old Unix-based chess program, GNU Chess, that Apple packaged up in a new wrapper.

GEM IN THE ROUGH
Talking to Chess

If your friends and co-workers are, for some reason, still unimpressed by Mac OS X and your mastery of it, invite them over to watch you play a game of chess with your Macby talking to it.

Open the Chess program. Unless you've turned it off (in Chess Preferences), the games speech-recognition feature is already turned on. When it's on, the round Feedback window should be visible onscreen.

To learn how to speak commands in a way that Chess will understand, click the small gray triangle at the bottom of the Speech Feedback panel to open the Speech Commands window. As usual, it lists all the commands that Chess can comprehend.

You specify the location of pieces using the grid of numbers and letters that appears along the edges of the chessboard. The White King, for example, starts on square e1 because he's in the first row (1) and the fifth column (e). To move the King forward by one square, you'd say: "King e1 to e2."

As the Speech Commands window should make clear, a few other commands are at your disposal. "Take back move" is one of the most useful. When you're ready to close in for the kill, the syntax is, "Pawn e5 takes f6."

And smile when you say that.

When you launch Chess, you're presented with a fresh, new game that's set up in Human vs. Computer modemeaning that you (the Human, with the white pieces) get to play against the Computer (your Mac, on the black side). Drag the chess piece of your choice into position on the board, and the game is afoot.

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Tip: Choose Chess Preferences to change the difficulty level, and to customize the appearance of the board and pieces (fur pawns, anyone ?).

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Figure 14-4. Chess isn't just another computerized chess game; it's also one of the more visually striking programs you get with Mac OS X. You don't have to be terribly exact about grabbing the chess pieces when it's time to make your move. Just click anywhere within a piece's current square to drag it into a new position on the board.