Vampire Chess

Vampire Chess is James Burton's 1994 chess-and-checkers hybrid in which all the pieces look like vampires. Originally released as a demo from his Stanford account, the Info-Mac upload was the full version - the subject line cheerfully announces "Vampire Chess (no longer a demo!)" - with multiple selectable piece graphics, sound effects, and a small but distinct ruleset twist.

Rules with bite

The board and turn structure read as chess at a glance, but Burton blends in a checkers-style promotion: vampires reaching the opposite side of the board gain movement upgrades, with a further upgrade if they make it back to their home row. The "King" piece doesn't capture in the conventional sense - it converts opposing pieces to its own side, in keeping with the vampire conceit.

Presentation

Burton's pitch leans on the look and feel: "Features great graphics and lots of sounds." Multiple graphics sets for the pieces are bundled, so players can swap the vampire art between matches. The Macintosh Garden mirror classifies it as a 68k strategy/board title compatible from System 7.0 through Mac OS 9.

System requirements

The BinHex header is explicit: "Requires a Macintosh capable of displaying at least 256 colors on at least a 640 x 480 pixel monitor." That puts the floor at color-capable Macs of the early 1990s - 68k machines from the LC line up are fine, and SheepShaver / Basilisk II both run it cleanly today.

Provenance

Distributed through Info-Mac as vampire-chess.hqx in the game/brd/ board-game subtree. Author contact is jimburtn@leland.stanford.edu (James Burton). Macintosh Garden hosts the disk image as Vampire_Chess.img_.sit (677 KB) with one in-game screenshot. No MobyGames record exists for the title.