Virtual Hangout of Lee Edwards

Lee's Strategic Board Game and Other Links

 

 

 

 

www.rebel.nl - Download Rebel Decade 3, the mother of all freeware chess programs. Master strength with a database and many features. Must have a 386 or higher. Another strong free program is Bob Hyatt's Crafty, the engine which powered Cray Blitz. You will have to run Crafty on the Winboard, Fritz, ChessBase, Millenium Chess System, or some similar interface.

www.pitt.edu/~schach/Archives - the Pitt Chess Archives. Download *.pgn game database files, readable by Rebel Decade 3. www.chesslab.com - Online searchable database of 2,000,000 games. Frequently updated. Great site! Affiliated with GameColony.com.

Mark Crowther's The Week In Chess.

Ubi's Chessmaster 9000 site has some good downloads, including some great new desktop wallpaper. But to my mind the best download available on the site are the Chessmaster Opening Books, which will work on any version of the Chessmaster series from Chessmaster 5000 on.

www.chesscafe.com - another good chess site.

chess.about.com - An internet guide to chess, together with an extensive collection of links.

www.uschess.org - Official site of the United States Chess Federation. Lots of good information and an extensive collection of links.

tnchess.org - Official site of the Tennessee Chess Association.

www.chessmail.com - Tim Harding's chess

Check out Tom Purser's site if you like the Blackmar-Diemer Gambit. 

Purple Software - British publisher of Chess Champion (formerly known as Chess System Tal), Shogi, and Go programs. You can now download software directly from their site and pay for it with your credit card. Purple Software, which sells game software for the Palm, Windows CE, and other handheld platforms took over Oxford Software, which developed game software for the PC.

www.icdchess.com - ICD/Your Move. Computer chess and games company. Reviews of most of the top computer programs.

www.tasc.nl - Tasc, a Dutch computer chess company. Publishers of TascBase and Chessica.

www.chessbase.com - ChessBase, the German company with an English language site. Sells the engines Fritz, Junior, HiArcs, and Nimzo. Lots of downloads including some WinBoard engines which will run inside Fritz.

Chessbase also maintains an online searchable database.

www.chessbaseusa.com - The U.S. distributor of ChessBase. Chessbaseusa now distributes PocketFritz (really Shredder) for Pocket PC handhelds.

www.bookup.com - Bookup, the positional database by Mike Leahy. Lots of free downloads and links.

www.chess4less.com - Chess For Less, publisher of the MasterChess and Essentia databases.

Zillions of Games - This program uses a universal gaming engine, the same search algorithm for all of its games. There are 292 games on the CD, which is available from this site for approximately $30 plus shipping. I highly recommend this program, despite the fact that the Chess program is weak, perhaps no stronger than 1900 ELO, and the Mini-Go program is extremely weak. A large number of variants are available, including Shogi, Xiang Qi, Korean Chess, and Monster Chess. Other games not on the CD, such as Edgar Rice Burroughs' Jetan or Martian Chess, can be downloaded from the site.

ChessTiger is currently the strongest chess program available for the Palm OS. A Pocket PC version is promised soon.

Chess Genius is now available for the Palm and Pocket PC operating systems.

www.pocketgamer.org This site has information and reviews on handheld gaming software.

Chess Archaeology, Chessopolis, and Anti-Computer Chess are interesting sites.

Large collections of links: RajnCajn's Cyber Chess, Bill Wall's Chess Links, and La Mecca Chess Encyclopedia.

Another good site for downloading free programs is boardgamecentral.com.

www.gammonvillage.com - A very good online magazine covering the U.S. backgammon scene. Also has theoretical articles.

jelly.effect.no - Download Jellyfish, very strong neural net backgammon program. There used to be a $30 registration fee for the Jellyfish player version. Now it is free. Many professional players own the expensive analysis version. You can now download the neural net Go program WinHonte from this Norwegian company.

Visit www.oasya.com for information on JellyFish's competitor Snowie, also a neural net program. The full professional version of Snowie is quite expensive, but you can download the player version of Snowie free for 15 days (registration $39) or play against it by surfing on to www.gamesgrid.com. Gamesgrid, I am told, is the place to play backgammon on the net and other board games will be offered in the near future.

SlapGammon Advanced backgammon program for Palm from Neko Software. Free trial download.

www.nashvillebackgammon.com the Nashville Backgammon Club.

ftp://ftp.nj.nec.com/pub/igord/IOS/pd/pc - Download the excellent Othello endgame problem program icare_us.zip. Surprisingly addictive. Also the excellent Othello playing programs Flip-It (flipsh47.zip), Thor (thor336.zip), and Forest. 

www.nada.kth.se/~gunnar/othello.html - Free download of the excellent Windows based Othello program WZebra by Gunnar (not to be confused with Goran) Andersson. You should also check out CEZebra, Wzebra's "little brother", adapted for PocketPC platforms by Israel's Pavel Radzivilovsky.

U.S. Othello Association, 7 Peter Cooper Road #10G, New York, NY 10010 Send $13 for a one-year membership and the strategy booklet Othello: Brief and Basic by Ted Landau.

www.reversi.se View the online WThor database of almost 80,000 Othello games from tournaments all over the world. This site also has a great strategy guide, including common traps and swindles.

Study animated Othello openings at the Dutch Othello association's site. Other national association sites in no particular order: Canadian Othello Association, Australian Othello Federation, Italian Othello Federation, British Othello Federation, Danish Othello Federation, French Othello Federation, Othello Association of Singapore, Hong Kong Othello Association.

Happy End as well as I-Care, are excellent Othello endgame problem programs. 

www.maths.nottingham.ac.uk/othello Joel Feinstein's pages have lots of strategy articles and information, including a great beginner's section. Dr. Feinstein is a strong British player who rigorously proved that 6x6 Othello is a win for White, the player with the second move.

www.geocities.com/TimesSquare/Arcade/3220/coo.htm - The Ninja Othello Players' site. 

perso.wanadoo.fr/brunodlb/ushomepg.htm - Bruno de la Boisserie's site. Part of this site is in French, but you'll be able to figure out most of it.

handel2000.tripod.com - MidnigHt's Othello site.

www.stevemaughan.com/reversi.htm - download the Edge Reversi (Windows) program from this site.

Download the French artificial intelligence Othello program Darwersi from this site.

Othello News and Pressibus Reversi are also good sites. You can't download the super-strong Logistello program by Michael Buro, but you can download it's book.

www.usgo.org - Official site of the American Go Association. Lots of links and good information about Go software, books, and equipment.

www.britgo.org/gopcres/gopcres1.html - The British Go Association's download page. Lots of free Go software. I recommend WinHonte, EZ-Go, Igo, and the free 9x9 edition of HandTalk.

www.yutopian.com/go - One of the better commercial Go programs is GoeMate, formerly known as HandTalk by China's Professor Chen Zhixing, available from Yutopian Enterprises. HandTalk is written in assembly language and moves very quickly. Ranked 4 kyu, HandTalk was the first program to beat me rather consistently at full-scale 19x19 Go. The 9x9 version, against which I usually win, is very addictive and may be downloaded free from the British Go site above. You can also purchase the Wulu Go program from Professor Chen, or from domestic U.S. suppliers, and you can purchase Goddess, the Windows version of Ken Chen's algorithm, known as GoIntellect in its Mac incarnation, from Yutopian. However, Goddess will not run on Windows XP.

www.smart-games.com/manyfaces.html - Homepage of David Fotland's The Many Faces of Go. Many Faces is an incarnation of Fotland's Cosmos, the first commercial Go program for the PC. A Windows CD-ROM version of Many Faces is available.

You can download and play Arnoud van der Loeff's program Turbogo for free. Register and pay to unlock the top playing levels. You can also download a free Go screensaver from this site. The screensaver will replay Go games in .sgf format. Such games are widely available for free on the net.

Sensei's Library - A collaborative website. Great for learning to play Go.

GoBase.org has a very large database of Go games in .sgf format. The site is free, but downloading requires registration.

www.ippi.com/pub_ishi.html - Homepage of Ishi Press, supplier of Go software, books, and equipment.

Slate and Shell, publisher of Go books and software, including the Master Go database.

Samarkand - another good source for Go books and equipment

Dr. Mick Reiss' Computer Go page. Dr. Reiss' commercial Go program is available at www.goplusplus.com.

Milton N. Bradley's Go page. Mindy McAdams' Go page.

www.shogi.net - Go to Pieter Stouten's Shogi (Japanese Chess) page to download gnushogi. Also lots of good links.

Now you can play Shogi Online at the java Shogi Dojo.

www.netspace.net.au/~trout/index.html - Is a Shogi variant also a chess variant? At this Australian site you can download a program containing large-scale historic variants from medieval Japan, which bridge the gap between chess and war games. I also like this program's Shogi icon. The program now plays Shogi instead of simply illustrating the various games

txa.ipoline.com/xq.html - Peter Sung's Xiang Qi (Chinese Chess) page. Lots of free software and links. You can play Xiang Qi on the net.

www.cc-xiexie.com/home.php - Xie Xie Master commercial Xiang Qi program. 

www.nchess.com/saola.html - Saola commercial Xiang Qi program from Vietnam.

www.usacheckers.com American Checkers Federation homepage.

checkerworld.com Chess and Go players may take issue with the claim that checkers is "the world's most intellectual game", but be glad you don't have to learn the Aryshire Lassie opening!

Visit www.triplejump.net for reviews of all the best checkers programs and other checkers related information.

www.chessandcheckers.com - PC Solutions game software. Lots of free downloads, including the very strong Blitz Draughts checker program and the Flip-It Othello program (also downloadable from the Othello ftp site given above). The stronger, Windows based Sage 6000 Draughts program is available separately. PC Solutions' programmer, Adrian Millett, is listed as a co-author of the Genius 6 chess program with Richard Lang. The look and feel of Sage is very similar to Genius.

www.nemesis.info/nexus.htm - Download a free version of the excellent British draughts program Nexus. Nexus' big brother, Nemesis, is an excellent commercial program.

www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook - Play against Chinook, the world's greatest checker playing entity, over the net. This Canadian site also has an excellent link to a Scientific American article concerning board games and artificial intelligence. For general information about artificial intelligence and classic board games, also check out www.gameai.com.

www.jimloy.com/checkers/checkers.htm - Jim Loy's site: checkers, chess, games, puzzles, math.

www.h4ns.net/checkers Hans L'Hoest's checckers pages

www.chessclub.com - Internet Chess Club, the best chess-playing site on the net, first week free, then $50/year for unlimited access.

www.caissa.com, www.chessed.com, www.chesslive.com, www.mplayer.com and the Free Internet Chess Server www.freechess.org are some additional chess sites. A team at the Free Internet Chess Server is involved in a distributed computing project to crack the RC5 code.

www.zone.com - Microsoft Internet Gaming Zone, classic board games are free. Requires Microsoft Internet Explorer.

www.playsite.com - Java based free game site with clocks and ratings. May require Microsoft Internet Explorer browser, 28,800 baud modem or better preferred.

GameColony.com - Play chess, checkers, backgammon, and card games for free. Affiliated with www.chesslab.com.

www.vinco.ru - Vinco Online Games, aka VOG, a Russian company with a server in Nebraska. Go figure. Good graphics, clocks, and ratings. First month free, then approximately $25 per year. I think that VOG has the best site on the net for Othello, although some might prefer IOS.

Information on all of these games is available at www.yahoo.com/Recreation/Games/Board_Games/. Yahoo now offers a free gaming site for Chess, Checkers, Backgammon, and Reversi at games.yahoo.com.

www.letsplaychess.com - A good new site devoted to chess only - with long, postal-style time controls and thematics. Highly recommended.

www.itsyourturn.com - Turn-based gaming is rather like correspondence play. The time control is at least 24 hours per move, but you can give a simul and play a number of games at once. They have stopped making you click on their advertising once every 40 moves and have added Chinese Chess.

The Mind Sports Olympiad has a new site. Download the software, by the Zillions of Games people, and you can play Chess, including variants like Monster Chess and Shogi, as well as other classic board games against human and computer opponents. Be sure to read Mindzine, an excellent source of news for all your favorite board games, published on the MSO site.

www.diplom.org - The Diplomatic Pouch. Play the classic Avalon Hill game Diplomacy online.

www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Midfield/1264 - International Email Chess Club. Games since 1995 are archived for download in *.pgn or popular database formats.

www.usatt.org - Official site of USA Table Tennis. Some of you may know that my brother, Bill Edwards, was Tennessee state table tennis champion in Men's Singles. Bill was one of the top players in the country in the Boys Under 17 division and played Japanese Champion Norio Takashima at the U.S. Open in Oklahoma City. I won the Tennessee Men's Doubles title three times with three different partners (Sai Wing Kwok, Danny Buren, and Larry Thoman - never with Bill). My beautiful wife, Melanie Spain Edwards, was once among the ten highest rated female players in the U.S.

tabletennis.about.com - An excellent site with a great collection of links. Hosted by former U.S. Champion Sean O'Neill.

members.aol.com/nttc - The Nashville Table Tennis Club site.

www.newgy.com - Gallatin, Tennessee based manufacturer of the Newgy table tennis robot.

www.nashv.lib.tn.us - The Public Library of Nashville and Davidson County.

www.bookfinder.com - Search for out of print books on the net.

www.themodernword.com/borges - The Garden of Forking Paths. A site dedicated to the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges.

www.philipkdick.com - A site dedicated to the late American science fiction author of Ubik, The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Blade Runner), and We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (Total Recall).

Rudy Rucker's homepage - Dr. Rucker is a professor of mathematics, a cyberpunk science fiction writer, and a direct descendant of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel. You can download free software from his site, most of which was formerly commercial, including Chaos: The Software and Rudy Rucker's CA Lab. Look for Mandelbrot and Julia sets, fractals, cellular automata, artificial life, and hypercubes. Seek ye the gnarl!

You can download a free 32-bit version of John Horton Conway's classic computer game of Life or a simulation of the famous German Enigma cipher machine at the linked sites. If you want the Enigma machine and run Windows, get enigma_w.zip. The self-extracting enigma22.exe is okay for DOS.

Explore the brave new world of three-dimensional Cyberspace at Bruce Damer's Avatars site or at Active Worlds.

Visit BotSpot for information on various web bots, or check out information on Swarm Intelligence.

www.sover.net/~manx/cell24.html - Another visit to your friendly neighborhood fourth dimension.

For classic texts and other public domain literature, I recommend Books Online and Project Gutenberg. www.bartleby.com also has an excellent collection of reference material and public domain literature.

Instead of running that same old screen saver while you sleep, your computer could be doing something useful like searching data for extraterrestrial radio signals. Click for information on other distributed computing projects (such as cracking codes, looking for prime numbers, or calculating pi) at www.freechess.org and www.distributed.net.

Lee's Legal Research Links Page

Onward to Lee's Favorite Quotes

On to Lee's Chess Games Page

If you feel an irresistible impulse to send me something using strong crypto, click here for my public PGP keys.

 Webcounter