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Gary Gifford wrote on Thu, Oct 25, 2007 12:44 AM UTC:
George, thanks for the detailed comment.

Pillars Of Medusa is largely based on Turkish Great Chess (circa 1797), and so, is not very imaginative, on my part. I was, however impressed with Turkish Great Chess and I needed a chess-like game for a sci-fi novel I was working on. So I added a Medusa and a Morph and played around with piece-names only for the sake of the novel (I did not know there was a CV web-site).

To see how POM plays I highly recommend the strong Zillions game version created by software engineer Jason Jakupca in January of 2004 (after he and I played a few games of POM face-to-face).

I had the pleasure of watching two strong chess players play POM over-the-board [on my homemade set] while a crowd gathered around. One player was from Russia, the other from Venezuela - so the game had the feeling of some important championship. The crowd and players all seemed to be quite impressed with the game. Mainly Medusa play... that was the real excitement.

It has been my experience that 'a game where pawns simply get picked-off' does not happen.

Often good Medusa play will decide the game. The Medusa is not to be underestimated. I believe Tony Q. missed a win against me in my first POM game here (at CV) by missing a strong Medusa move.

Again, to get a good idea of game play, I highly recommend playing against Jason's Zillions application. I think you will find it to be a fun and challenging game... and that you may have a hard time beating the Z engine.


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