Fritz & Chesster - Learn to Play Chess Vol. 1

Fritz & Chesster - Learn to Play Chess Vol. 1

Learn to think strategically, try out tricky mental exercises and master fun and exciting challenges – all with a generous helping of chess knowledge. These things and more await you on this unusual chess adventure that has already received great international acclaim.

Start playing Fritz & Chesster Volume 1 and join Prince Fritz and his cousin Bianca on their journey through the rules of chess and many tactical motifs.

Once upon a time there was a small country, a very, very small country. And this very small country was ruled by a very wise king. In fact he was the wisest King there had ever been. And he was called “King White”

This is the beginning of a very interesting new product by ChessBase: Fritz & Chesster. It is possibly also the most important piece of software created by the company, for a very simple reason.

Like none of the other products, Fritz, Junior, Shredder, or even ChessBase itself, Fritz and Chesster is one that can recruit new players to the game.

We predict that tens of thousands of children will take up chess because they had access to this program.

Fritz and Chesster does not teach chess in the usual way. It does not set up a board and explain how each of the pieces move. Instead it targets children who have never played chess before in their lives and teaches them the basic rules in a Sesame Street like environment. There are cartoons and stories for the children to follow, and then there are tasks for them to solve interactively.

_Oh ye, Oh ye, Oh ye!

Listen all young heroes well

Whom the chess game doth compel:

Aspiring masters of the game

Come and enter here your name

Then I beg click on the seal

The world of chess awaits your zeal_

Each piece and each rule is explained in a subgame, which you can play against the computer. Many of them are far away from the actual game of chess, but at the same time they give the children full insight into the sometimes daunting rules of the game.

Take for instance the first sequence. Young Prince Fritz has to stand in for a while for his father, King White. Together with his cousin Bianca Fritz embarks on a journey through their kingdom.

On their journey they are joined by Kalaidoscope, a jolly instructor, who tells them all about the kingdom. In each scene the children can click different elements, like the mouse traps in the above picture, funny things happen. It encourages the young users to explore the scenery.

On their trip around the kingdom the three encounter the daunting King Black, who challenges them to a game of chess. But Fritz doesn’t know how to play. Thankfully he is able to learn the game on the rest of his trip.

The first lesson comes when they see two sumo wrestlers fighting in a ring. The wrestlers are too fat to approach each other directly, so they always stay at least one square apart. They move around the board blocking each other off.

If they do it properly Fritz and Bianca can push their opponent off the board. After that they try to occupy chairs before their opponent, and while trying to do so the program explains how they can use “opposition” to outwit the opponent. At the end of this lesson the children have learnt everything they need to know about the king move, including the concept of opposition.

Learning the rook moves is equally entertaining. In a pacman-like game the children learn to move the rook and avoid capture by the enemy spiders. There are sound effects and high-score lists to keep their attention.

The bishop move is learnt by bouncing a ball off a rectangular paddle to destroy toilet bowls (the kind of thing young children find hilarious). Since the ball moves diagonally they are learning to operate the bishop. Mind you, these games might also create some problems. Very often the parents start to play them and compete against their offspring. There can be ugly scenes when it turns out, as it usually does, that the children are better.

The stand-alone chess teacher

The principle of Fritz & Chesster is that you can insert the CD into a computer drive, fire up the program and then leave a child alone with it if necessary. After a few weeks the child will come to you and say: “Can we play a game of chess?” It will have learnt all the rule – we are talking pawn moves, castling rules, promotion, mate, stalemate, everything – and even understand a bit about strategy and tactics.

Naturally you do not need to or indeed should leave your child alone with the program. In fact we have discovered that it is often usually children and their mothers who pick up the game. The fathers usually get hooked on the subgames, battling to keep ahead of the kids.

More Images of the game


Read More: Best Board Game Strategy Games.


Fritz & Chesster - Learn to Play Chess Vol. 1 on Steam

合成大西瓜 | Big watermelon

合成大西瓜 | Big watermelon

Big watermelon is a very interesting and exciting game, which is very popular with many players. Let’s see if you can successfully merge watermelon. It has a certain difficulty.

Move your fingers to see if you can successfully complete the challenge, the fun of randomness waiting for you to experience, so just play it, come and join Big watermelon!

The game is a bit like 2048, two fruits of the same size can be made into a bigger fruit, and finally can be made into a big watermelon!

The whole thing is simple, but the falling fruits are random, so you need to arrange them according to the falling fruits,


Read More: Best Board Game Casual Games.


合成大西瓜 | Big watermelon on Steam

JENTRIX

JENTRIX

Meet Jentrix! This game was inspired by the famous board game and combines the very best of Jenga, match-3 and Tetris. And it’s all packed in Virtual Reality!

We are pretty sure you know the classic Jenga, but what if instead of wooden blocks there would be colorful fruit cubes, the towers would grow every second, and crocodiles would try to bite your hands?

Jentrix mixes different sets of mechanics from everyone’s favorite games. Jenga provides its well-known look of the tower and tests your physical and mental skills. Match-3 brings its popular 3-in-a-row portion, while Tetris vibes will put you to the edge as the tower grows.


Read More: Best Board Game Casual Games.


JENTRIX on Steam

Magic Lessons in Wand Valley - a jigsaw puzzle tale

Magic Lessons in Wand Valley - a jigsaw puzzle tale

A lovely puzzle game with a simple story to go along with the wonderful colours and excellent design. This is a game for jigsaw puzzle fans. There are only six separate pictures, and the challenge comes from playing with more and more pieces. The artwork is outstanding, especially if you like the fantasy genre (wizards in particular). This game could be suitable for younger players at the 135-piece level; however, there is enough depth to entertain experienced puzzlers.

Pros:

  • art design

  • puzzle design (clearly thought went into how the light effects add to challenge and interest)

Real player with 104.1 hrs in game

I really like this jigsaw puzzle game. The illustrations are beautiful and tell a simple but nice story. The modes with different amount of pieces lets you play for many hours. The music is very comforting and keeps you in the mood. It has some nice features to help setting up the puzzles. The entire series from the studio is worth playing. Recommended!

Real player with 22.9 hrs in game

Magic Lessons in Wand Valley - a jigsaw puzzle tale on Steam

What The Dub?!

What The Dub?!

Overall, my gaming group loves it as an addition to the Jackbox stuff.

It is very well done and fun! You can make it as clean or as dirty as you like which means everyone can play. The clips are weird and esoteric enough that most people won’t know where they’re from and that is perfect. I hope they add more.

I do have some minor suggestions, though.

Something more for the audience to do. Maybe they could throw out suggestions on screen or something. Just a thought. Being in the audience can be boring at times. I know more players would mean more repeating clips, but maybe have the game know when there are more than 6 and only use short clips for that game so it doesn’t get too monotonous.

Real player with 8.8 hrs in game

As an English teacher during this seemingly never-ending pandemic, thank you for this game! It’s so simple to set up and incorporate What the Dub into online lessons via Zoom, Microsoft Teams etc that I’d recommend it to any and all ESL teachers.

The included video clips manage to be both humorous in their dubbing potential whilst also being relatively simple in terms of their language that it allows students who are A2 level and above to reliably produce clever, funny or appropriately wacky sentences. Moreover, the simplicity of the game makes it suitable for everyone over the age of 10 and the price is very fair for what’s offered.

Real player with 8.3 hrs in game

What The Dub?! on Steam

Raygun Chess

Raygun Chess

Raygun Chess is a Early Access free VR game that is very bare bones right now. It worked on my HTC Vive system, looked ok, played ok, sounded ok. There are only 6 boards at the time of this review and they are part of the tutorial. The tutorial worked. Nothing else you can play at this time. There is no multiplayer at this time. Sort of interesting take on battle chess.

Not sure how to play the big board with the 4 players. Looked like a tech demo at this time.

Maybe come back to this game sometime Next year.

Real player with 0.3 hrs in game

There is a very good reason no-one has come up with a game to take over from chess and that is because chess is the perfect game! But that doesn’t stop ‘Raygun Chess’ from giving it a go. In short, it is chess, but with rayguns. So you have a handful of pieces that move in certain directions and amounts and if they get close enough to an opposing piece they will shoot it down. To be fair the models look good and so does the sparse, but oddly peaceful space setting! But when it comes to gameplay I just couldn’t get into it. The grabbing mechanic of the pieces hardly worked at all and when it did I found that there wasn’t a lot of strategy involved, in fact, you can win all the levels by simply moving your shooters over to the enemy as fast as you can. But hey! Someone might like this and it is at least free, so I will give it the thumbs up with a note that if I could have given it a neutral rating I would have. But it didn’t deserve the thumbs down because it is free after all.

Real player with 0.1 hrs in game

Raygun Chess on Steam

The Little Trashmaid Puzzletime

The Little Trashmaid Puzzletime

Lots of nice puzzles to play! However, there are some things that make this game a bit tedious

  1. Lack of proper volume control. There are only 3 volume settings: Loud, Medium and Mute. No slider or more options

  2. Pieces have to be held after clicking. Please add a toggle or something where we can select what mouse option we want, between click, hold and drag the piece, or click once, and the piece is stuck, click again and the piece is released.

Other than that, it’s a decent puzzle game. Laughing at all the pictures from old episodes, and some new ones as well!

Real player with 22.7 hrs in game

I love that the puzzles are pictures from the webtoon comic plus there is actual art of the characters.

Real player with 12.9 hrs in game

The Little Trashmaid Puzzletime on Steam

Drawgaem

Drawgaem

What if I tell that there is more than just drawing and guessing? sounds stupid right? well, the stupidity is finally here.

“Stupid stupid stupid” - Big guns man

There are new gaemmodes around!

X new GAEMMODES

  • Drawphone - [description]

  • Vote mode (carps against humanity)

  • Hotseat mode (zone war) (EVERYONE IN ONE CANVAS!!!!)

  • Competition mode

    And many many minigaems and interactions

    Wondering how these minigaems work? well, it’s simple

  • During a match you will pick a word

  • Then you will start drawing

  • Then you keep drawing while a lot of stuff tries to get you down, like ants, rain, wind, flies, your friends, your fear of failing, your parents' disappointment, your pencil breaking, your canvas flipping around…

  • and then wait for your friends to guess

    See? very simple!

    You think we’re out of features?

    “Negative” - Counter-attack: Worldwide globally ofended Counter-protester

    There are still a couple more!

    SAVE YOUR DRAWINGS

    Looking for that old masterpiece you drew weeks ago?

    We got you covered

    Here is it… But I would re-consider your career goals

    How did I find it?

    Good question!

    Basically, Every match is instantly saved for you to revisit, which makes picking on your friends way easier, trust me.

    Our drawing tools are very helpful for every level of artist out there! Their words, not mine:

    “I wouldn’t be anyone without drawgaem” - Leandro Da Vinci

    “A small price to pay for an hilarious game to play with friends” - Angry purple stone collector

    WE HAVE AN INSTANT SEARCH BUTTON

    • We have a button for the airheaded! You click it and it’s mind refreshing, never miss a word for daydreaming your life away again.

    Hey there day-dreamers, this button will save your life gaemplay, letting you remember any word like you were an elephant (I’ve been told they remember everything,

    -but I haven’t talked to one before, so I don’t know about that)

    -but that wouldn’t explain how Dumbo got lost, right?)

    FUN CHARACTERS

    Yes!

    [roaster1] [roaster2] [roaster3] [roaster4]

Drawgaem on Steam

Hidden Objects - Cartoon Fantasy

Hidden Objects - Cartoon Fantasy

This developer misrepresents the gameplay of most of their games; many descriptions have been changed because they state “Play a cool and relaxed match, with no time countdown”., Unfortunately, though there is no clock, there is an hourglass-type slider bar and the game will end if you don’t succeed within the time allotted. There is no way to disable that feature; it is also true for their “connect” games. I would have recommended had the timer been optional.

Real player with 0.1 hrs in game

Hidden Objects - Cartoon Fantasy on Steam

Jigsaw Puzzles

Jigsaw Puzzles

A good time killer

Real player with 4.5 hrs in game

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Real player with 4.2 hrs in game

Jigsaw Puzzles on Steam