Zen Chess: Mate in Three

Zen Chess: Mate in Three continues in the same vein as its predecessor: it's a nicely presented, chess-themed puzzle game that doesn't know anything about chess beyond the 8x8 grid, the two colours and the shape of the figures. As its puzzle mechanics, all it knows is the initial setup, and the sequence of 5 moves (WBWBW) needed to win - it doesn't even know which figure can make which move, as there's no differentiation between illegal moves and moves that don't get you to the solution. As in ZC:Mi2, this is a big disappointment, and a missed opportunity. Especially because the boards are much better, in general pretty good. There are 100 altogether, and unexpectedly, few of them are endgame - most of them are middle game where White has built a positional and sometimes power advantage, and there are some delicious early game ones where most figures are still on the table and Black almost fully immobilzed its King, and only needs a bit of help to completely lock it and get checkmated. Nice evil stuff :) I was genuinely surprised to see some reviews accusing the game of many boards requiring guessing. No, they don't - you just have to be able to think three moves ahead. There are many boards where the first move is rather inconspicuous, or seemingly stupid - but in every case, it servers to maneuver the Black King into a hopeless position. To me, these are patently good chess puzzles. The other accusation is that some / many boards have multiple valid solutions which the game doesn't allow. I'm not too sure here - whenever I thought of some obvious looking different solution, I was able to verify that it wouldn't work. However, if the game understood chess and made countermoves to every opening, these questions wouldn't even come up... In the end, as the puzzles are generally good and the interface is nice and unobtrusive, ZC:Mi3 is a good puzzle game, just isn't a chess game. Think of it as your Sunday chess puzzle edition in the local paper, which beeps when you think of the wrong move.