The Gess Home Page
Gess is a game that was featured in the Scientific American(November
1994 Issue). It is a way to play a game somewhat like chess on the Go
board.
What are the rules?
Each of the pieces is a 3x3 block of stones which is arbitarily chosen
by the player. It must contain at least one stone of the players, and
can't have any of the opposition stones inside the square. If there is
only one stone in the 3x3 square, then is musn't be in the centre.
The directions a piece can move are limited by the positions of stones
in the piece. For example, the following piece -
0 0
000
0
can move NE, NW, E, E, and S, and an unlimited distance in each
direction. If the stone in the centre was missing, it could only move 3
squares.
Pieces can move off the edge of the board, providing at least one
stone of it is still on the board, any bits dangling over the edge get
munched(note, it this implementation, this doesn't work :)
The object of the game is to keep your ring of stones intact(the
equivalent of a King in Chess), if it is broken at any time, the
player who's ring it was loses. Multiple rings per player are allowed.
A piece is chosen by clicking on its centre stone, and it can be
deselected by clicking in the same spot.
Acknowledgments
This program was origionally written by Heath Copeland in
Pascal, and the translated into Java by me(Daniel O'Connor)
Most of the algorithms for checking for correct moves etc where
written by Heath. I wrote the applet code and converted his code into
an OO paradigm.