Archon: Battle chess, anyone?

How many of you have watched the Harry Potter movies? Okay. How many of you remember watching Harry and Ron Weasley play a round of Wizard Chess, with Hermione Granger commenting how barbaric the game is? No, this post is not about an old Harry Potter video game since the Boy Who Lived probably wasn’t even in author J.K. Rowling’s head yet. It’s about Archon: The Light and the Dark, a computer game developed by Free Fall Associates and distributed by Electronic Arts.

Originally developed for the Atari 8-bit series in 1983, Archon was later ported to different systems, including the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, IBM PC, Nintendo Entertainment Sytem, and my personal favorite, the Apple II.

So what do Harry Potter and Wizard Chess have to do with Archon? Absolutely nothing except that the concept behind the highly successful book series’ game is the same as that of the highly successful computer game.

Here’s what wikipedia has to say about the game:

On the surface, Archon appears similar to chess, but there are a number of significant changes.

While the board is similar to a chessboard and the various pieces are similarly designed to have various offsetting abilities, when one piece attempts to take another, the removal of the targeted piece is not automatic. Instead, the two pieces are placed into a full-screen combat arena and must battle (arcade-style, with the players controlling the pieces) to determine who takes the square.

Almost like Wizard or Battle Chess, eh?

As mentioned previously, each piece has a special ability that it can use in the combat phase. These abilities include faster movement, longer lifespan, and greater damage, among others.

Special abilities aren’t the only factor in combat. A piece’s strength is also affected by the color of the square on which the combat occurs and by the light-dark cycle of neutral squares. Obviously, light-colored pieces are stronger when they are on white squares and during the light cycle, and the dark pieces are masters of dark squares and the dark cycle.

The game ends when either side destroys all opposing pieces or occupies all five power squares—the center square of each side of the board and the square in the center of the board.

Here’s a list of the pieces in Archon and some of their abilities:

Light: Valkyrie (flying, projectile weapon), Golem (slow, ground, projectile weapon), Unicorn (ground, projectile weapon), Djini (flying, projectile weapon), Wizard (teleport, spell caster, projectile weapon), Phoenix (flying, radial weapon that also allow projectile weapons to pass through harmlessly, but stops the phoenix’s movement), Archer (ground, projectile weapon), and Knight (ground, melee weapon).

Dark: Banshee (flying, radial weapon of similar range to that of the phoenix’s, but allows the banshee to move), Troll (slow, ground, projectile weapon), Basilisk (ground, projectile weapon), Shapeshifter (flying, takes the form and abilities of whatever piece it is in combat with), Sorceress (teleport, spell caster, projectile weapon), Dragon (flying, projectile weapon), Manticore (ground, projectile weapon), Goblin (ground, melee weapon).