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Here are some hints I would like to share with you ... 1. Capturing queens first looks natural ... they have the most capturing power and should be elimintaed first ... 2. Try to capture pieces with the most capturing power (they may capture in many directions) ... 3. Try to avoid capturing pieces that are dead in regards their capturing power ... they are not dangerous to your pieces right now ... 4. Try to capture in such a way that you position your piece in a place that is not attacked by enemy pieces ... bur you still can attack ... 5. Try to capture and move at the same time to the middle of the board ... this way you increase your capturing power ... pieces left on the edge of the board often are without this power ... 6. Always look for "open doors" after you capture ... it means looking for more capturing power ... 7. Be careful while capturing and opening lines of capture for enemy pieces ... it's very often ovelooked and changes situaton on the board dramatically ... I hope it will help all of you to play well Masacre Chess ... One more thing ... the seed for success in this game is planted in the first 16 moves (one fourth of the moves) ... it may not be so obvious but to master this game you need to use your imagination and intuition from the very first move ... Initial position is a real jungle, I must admit ... this is why I stated somewhere else that the computer will always win this game with humans ... unless ... Cheers, Andy.
ChessVariant: I'm not sure how good computers would be in the opening. It seems to me that the branching factor would be a computational hurdle. But I know I wouldn't care to play against them from the middle-game on, when they could "see" everything through to the finish.
wetware: it would be interesting to see this branching in some way ... I am pretty sure the beginning of the game is just planting the seeds for a victory ... we are unable to make any optimal move ... the only thing we can do is to think about areas of the board to find some group of opponent's pieces and try to isolate them and make them "dead" ... but, as far as I know computers CANNOT compete with master GO players ... at least for now ...simply too many branching ... so maybe there is a chance for us in Massacre Chess ... well, I didn't know I created a monster ... Andy.