Game 10: Amiga Chinese Checkers (1987)

United States
Released 1987
Genre: Board Game
Developer: Jimbo Barber
Date Started: 26 June 2025
Date Ended: 26 June 2025
Total Hours: 0.5
Difficulty: -
Final Rating: 11

I’m switching to a quick rating for these little adaptations to save some time. Chinese Checkers is a simple board game adaptation of the classic Chinese Checkers game. This looks fairly alright and seems like a solid implementation, until you actually try to play it. The mouse control is super finicky and laggy, making it hard to drag and drop the pieces (heck, even the movement of the mouse cursor itself is super choppy). It features computer players, which is nice, though I didn’t get far enough to see how well they play, because the game crashed to a Guru Meditation error after a while and I lacked the patience to start over. It gets a 4 for Programming because it’s basically a decent implementation (and also makes fine use of menus), but the Controls are just too bad to be enjoyable (2). It has no Vibe (0), the Graphics are decent (3) for a board game, there’s of course no Story (0), and nothing to show in the Audio department (0). Ultimately, it’s not very Fun (2), thanks to the laggy controls and the crash I experienced pretty early. This gives it a final rating of 11.

For some reason, apart from Jimbo Barber, the game is also credited to 17 Bit Software, which I was unable to verify. It’s never mentioned in the game proper or the documentation. It was likely conflated with another similar adaptation, Chinese Checkers from 1989 which was indeed published by 17 Bit Software.

As for Jimbo Barber, he seemed pretty active in the Amiga PD scene, we’ll meet him again shortly for 1987s Rock Slide and Landing at Io, 1989s Star Trek: The Game, and 1990s Destination: Moonbase. He’s also credited for Sextimates, an adult game from 1990, which looks odd and would have been an interesting entry, but it’s a commercial game, so I won’t cover it here.