Authors
Paolo Ciancarini, Gian Piero Favini
Description
Kriegspiel is a variant of the game of Chess, introduced to make it more similar to wargames. It mainly differs from Chess in that players can only see their own pieces: they have to refer to a neutral agent–the umpire, or referee–to acquire additional, but always incomplete, information. This paper deals with the development of a visual interface to play Kriegspiel over the Internet Chess Club. The interface is intelligent insofar as it is able to interpret the referee’s messages obtained by the ICC server, offering the player an intuitive visualization of such messages, in terms of graphic abstractions which represent the invisible pieces of the opponent. In this sense the interface is able to let light into the dark side of the chessboard.