Great to see more classic games, but 3 chess games at the same time may hurt each other as many may just pick which game is considered the best among them.

Not in my case, picking up all of them.

Chessmaster 9000, which, along a few other chess games(?) was delisted years ago would be nice to have back too, by the way.

Glad you will get to enjoy them all. Never really played chess seriously on PC not sure myself.

"Its RPG wek guys!!"
"Now how about some chess?"

• $3.34 • -33% • King's Table - The Legend of Ragnarok
• $4.68 • -33% • Grandmaster Chess
• $4.68 • -33% • Theatre of War I'm afraid Ch9000 will never come back here :( Insta-buy for me.
Regarding playing chess – Chessmasters had big data-base of interesting historical games, learning program and nice GUI – which make it worth using. I'm really sad I've missed Chessmaster 9000 here.

Grandmaster Chess seems to be a pretty decent old DOS Chess engine. It is simpler than their Fritz and similar hardcore engines from the DOS era (Fritz 3.0 and so on). It is more in the vein of Chessmaster series. It tries to be more user friendly.
It can be played in SVGA, it was pretty advanced for the time. It offers all the basic features a standard Chess game should offer except a historical games database, but it offers its own openings book. It has the classic learning game/tool and it can learn from mistakes during the game. Basic, fast, but not the best of the best.

Apparently the game is construnted under a modified version of the Zarkov 2.5 engine (an Evolution of GNU Chess)

Well, for collection, historical and chess interest reasons I think it is a decent game. Playing chess with a DOSBOX game is interesting even to compare with newer engines. And less resource hog.

Chyess!

I admit I didn't play those titles yet, but basing on the description, two of them just share some (rather superficial) similarities with chess. One of them is even real-time strategy. I guess that those two games should be appealing even to people who don't like chess too much (just my assumption though).

And of course I'm happy that new classics joined GOGs offer - especially since I didn't heard about those earlier.

Anybody played "King's Table - The Legend of Ragnarok"?

Looks vaguely interesting to play, at least for a couple of hours.

Otherwise, for grandmaster, I've played my fill of chess in high school and I'm at the level where any somewhat decent chess software will own me, at least at max difficulty. I don't need anything fancy. I'm guessing 99%+ of the potential customer base is in that situation. I'm surprised that chess games still sell.

I believe that Chess games do not sell so many copies as in the past. That was one of the reasons the most "balanced/gamey" and popular Chessmaster stopped in their 10th/Grandmaster edition years ago. It was in hands of Ubi.

Freeware and open source Chess games aside, Today Chess games in general are more specialized and expensive pieces of software for a big niche. But a niche noneless. What use to be sold are a series of Engines with a GUI and/or a Database. Deep Analysys capabilities, multimedia books etc...

I still remember this one Chess game I was playing back a few years, even on the easier difficulties it was hard as hell, I was learning from playing but could never beat that difficulty (seriously it was like selecting easy and getting Insanity, it was ruthless) but after weeks of playing I was finally good enough to put up a fight and finally I was able to get into position to finish the game, I just had to take my Queen and move across the board for checkmate and just as I push the button to finish the move....... the power went out!

(This is a true story it actually happened)

My thoughts are somewhat similar about Tetris, yet that siren keeps beckoning me back towards rocky shores...

I don't understand the point of releasing ancient Chess video games.

Modern Chess engines in newer Chess video games are vastly more powerful and useful than any ancient ones ever could be.

Not all games become obsolete with age, but for these types of Chess video games in particular, they do.