Dragon Chess

Elliott is a JAVA program for playing Dragon Chess, a fantasy 3-dimentional chess variant devised by Gary Gygax, the creator of the pioneering role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons. It is played on 3 12x8 boards (representing the air, the land and the subterranean world, respectively). The pieces are fantasy characters (Mage, Paladin, Thief...) or monsters (Dragon, Basilisk, Griffon etc.) inspired by D&D settings. Some of them are just orthodox chess pieces with different names. The game was introduced in 1985 in issue No. 100 of Dragon Magazine.

Elliott

The program allows one to play against an AI or another human player (on the same computer). The move engine is based on a rather straightforward Monte Carlo tree search algorithm, with early playout termination (see this paper or this talk).

The implemented version slightly departs from the original game. We use the rules proposed by J. L. Cazaux in his book (in French) "Guide des échecs exotiques et insolites" (Chiron, 2000).

Download

A JAR file is available here.

Fees

Elliott has been developed for fun and is offered for free. But those who are willing to pay can make a donation to any association for defending victims of Dragons for protection of animals.

Disclaimer

Software downloaded from this webpage is provided 'as is' without warranty of any kind, either expressed or implied. The program has not been extensively tested and it may contain bugs.

Contact: ngp.peltier@gmail.com