FIGURE B

Expand the size of the board with the toggle button.

When you do this, you lose the individual player timers and the column that lists the moves made during the game, but if you tap on the toggle button again, you get this information back. This offers a nice balance between functionality and board size. I immediately jumped into a game and lost within five minutes (yes, on the easy level).

Options
One of the things I like most about new programs is checking out the options, so rather than suffer another humiliating defeat (at least right away), I turned to tweaking the program. Chess Genius has a variety of options organized as follows.

The Command menu is pictured in Figure C.

FIGURE C

Here's the view of the Command menu.

The Options menu is pictured in Figure D.

FIGURE D

Here's the view of the Options menu.

Game control
Chess Genius provides three modes of play: Player vs. Palm, Two Player, and Palm vs. Palm. Chess Genius allows you to save games to a memo file or load games from a memo file. The games will be stored in PGN (Portable Game Notation) format and must be loaded in PGN format. You also have the ability to set up the board however you wish. This is especially useful if you'd like to replay an old game from a specific point in order to study how you could have played better.

Chess Genius lets you move backward and forward through a game one step at a time or jump right to the first or last move of a game. You can also choose to switch sides at any point in the game. Finally, there's an option to set the time on the clocks to any value between one minute and two hours. You know the drill, if your clock runs out, you lose!

Display options
Chess Genius will let you modify the display in several different ways. You can expand the board to completely fill the screen, as shown in Figure E.

FIGURE E

You can expand the board to completely fill the screen.

You can reverse the board to get a different perspective on the game. You can change the colors (or shades of gray) of the squares on the board. You can also choose to enable fast animation, which will make the moves happen very quickly. You had better be paying attention if you enable this.

Strength of play
I have already mentioned that strength of play is one of the areas where Chess Genius shines. Playing level is selected by choosing how long the Palm handheld can think about its next move. If you select "1 second," the computer won't have very long to think, and game play will be fairly easy (for some people). You can choose one of ten settings between one second and three minutes. There's also an additional playing option called Permanent Brain. If you select this mode, the computer will never stop analyzing the game. This will give you the strongest play, but watch out. This mode is very processor intensive and will wear your batteries down more quickly.

Tools
Chess Genius gives you several interesting tools. One is a feature called "Mate In." This isn't a mode of game play, rather you set up the board as you want and then Chess Genius will calculate the minimum number of moves required to achieve checkmate.