The Complete Chess System (TCCS) was developed by Oxford Toolworks and released in 1992. I bought it that year (English language version) and remember unpacking the box to reveal an instruction booklet with an interesting pen and ink illustrated cover featuring caricatures of Korchnoi and Larsen (famous players at the time) as chess pieces on the board!
The game is well designed with a strong engine strength of around 2250 ELO (equivalent to International Master strength) will still beat the vast majority of players.
The Complete Chess System (TCCS) was developed by Oxford Toolworks and released in 1992. I bought it that year (English language version) and remember unpacking the box to reveal an instruction booklet with an interesting pen and ink illustrated cover featuring caricatures of Korchnoi and Larsen (famous players at the time) as chess pieces on the board!
The game is well designed with a strong engine strength of around 2250 ELO (equivalent to International Master strength) will still beat the vast majority of players. However TCCS can be made to play at different levels. Level 1 chooses moves almost randomly and is quite easy to win against while level 10 plays no random moves at all and is a much tougher opponent. In addition there are 4 'Strong
Opponent' levels you can choose: Tournament, Average, Matching and Infinite which are differentiated by how much time is taken by TCCS. I once defeated TCCS on Matching time level and it felt like I had done the impossible!
Graphically the game is adequate for its purposes with a choice of 2D or 3D views of the board. The different screens are well set out and balance game play and information windows - the pieces are a bit clunky in design (though you can design your own pieces in game if you want to) but like most chess games it's the gameplay that's important and here TCCS is very impressive.
All standard chess features are present. The game uses an opening book of over 300,000 moves and you can control the way the engine will use its book so you can make it play just certain types of openings or choose randomly amongst the whole range. You can also add moves to its opening book and force it to play your own pet opening against you! There is also a database of famous games you can replay and add comments to and you can save and replay games. It will also rate your play and give you a grade. Part of this is a test suite of chess problems which you can try to solve in time limits. Probably the most interesting thing about TCCS is that its playing style was developed to try and mirror human play instead of being based on pure brute force. Because of this it will play in ways that are not like most computers all the time and this makes for better game play in my opinion. All in all TCCS is a very good game with advanced features for its time.
