I meant King’s pawn, 6 spaces. I didn’t think it through enough 5 years ago. You would think that I would recall the incident more clearly when I wrote this post. Back then, the incident was probably only about 20 years earlier. Now it is closer to 25.

As for the C64/Herc card combo, I think ownership of a Hercules card (and able to recall that) puts us in a pretty rare group already.

In fact, even remembering monochrome screens at all…

My actual comment regards this:

My opening move was to move my Queen’s pawn forward seven spaces – taking the black King.

This is surprising in quite a few ways, giving rise to the following possibilities:

1. Perhaps you said seven because “the pawn starts one row up from the bottom, and the opponent’s king is on the eighth row” but really meant six (classic off-by-one error, perhaps due to too much Python on the brain).

2. The kings face each other at the start, on the same column, so perhaps you meant you moved your king’s pawn.

3. You moved your queen’s pawn, but perhaps you felt it not worth mentioning the one-square lateral portion of the move because pawns normally capture from the adjacent column anyway.

4. The game’s interface was such that you specified moves in terms of displacement, rather than destination, and thus you issued the command to really move your queen’s pawn seven squares forward (only) and through array bound overflow or other logic error, it calculated the pawn’s new position as the starting position of the black king, thus capturing it.

5. The game actually provided an incorrect starting layout, such that the black king faced the white queen.

6. Not a possibility, but rather a musing, since you didn’t mention whether your pawn got promoted: I wonder if the game was designed to handle promotions. This spawns further musings (which I’ll not bother numbering), such as whether it always promoted to queen, or provided some kind of interface to choose your promotion. And if you chose your own promotion, whether you could choose pawn, or perhaps even a piece of the other color, etc.

But even without the conundrum of Julian’s Gambit (Ignored), this post brings back memories. Also, you are the only person I am aware of who had both a Commodore 64 as well as a PC with a Hercules Graphics Card. (I had various 8-bit Atari computers, as well as a Hercules-equipped PC, but never a C64. And I never witnessed monochrome Battle Chess, as I played the native Amiga version.)

It got caught in a limbo state between being posted and being rejected as spam, and wouldn’t appear until I manually pushed it through the spam filters again.

I am trying to reassure myself it was a coincidence, and not just part of a spammer’s vengeful Denial Of Service attack.

But who knows.

(Hey! You are not supposed to be supporting SpamKarma any more. I hope the real-life karma of doing so helps with your re-incarnation.)

An easy workaround is to add your own URL to the gray list. For that matter, you could probably even blacklist it (your own comments will still go through no matter what).