Old but still gold, Cyber Chess is (as the title obviously states) a chess game, and the default play mode is the standard 2 opposing sides, black and white (or red and blue in the case of this game) facing off against one another across a board. Unlike most chess games however, the pieces do not walk or slide across the spaces of the board, but zigzag across nodes on the playing field.
The board is made up of a grid and where a vertical and horizontal gridlines meet there is a node (a space you can move to).
When the pieces move across the grid they transform into little pulses of light and zoom around on the gridlines. When the piece reaches its destination, it turns back into the piece it was (sorry, no transforming pieces in this game). Should an enemy piece be occupying the same node as the destination of your piece, the pulse of energy (formerly your piece) will literally blow the enemy piece into itty-bitty fragments of its former self!
In Cyber Chess the pieces look different too! They all have these awesome designs which look really (for lack of a better word) cyber! The pawn is a great example. A trapezoidal base with a bight orb of color resting on top somehow makes the most insignificant piece in the
game look pretty darn cool.
Apart from these differences, the game is pretty much standard chess, with all the same pieces, and all the same rules as the original game (e.g. king dies = you lose).
I remember first playing this when I was about 10 years old. Between this and Battle Chess (a very similar game in which the pieces actually eat, stab, club, incinerate and trap each other when attacking) I couldn't get enough of board games!
Probably the 2 best things about this game are 1) The AI, which can be incredibly smart and hard to beat (set both players to AI control for cool battles) and 2) Board customization. You may not believe it, but you can actually set the pieces on the board up in any way you want! You can remove all the pawns in the front row to have a quick and dirty match, or my favorite style of gameplay, QUEENS! To play queens, set up the board using only the queen pieces. Give each side about 6 to 10 queens AND WATCH STUFF EXPLODE!
