I played two games of Chess Titans at level 3 (out of 10) today and won both, the first one barely and the second one decisively. I'm getting a good feel for the early and mid-game strategy. My weakness is the end game. I need to learn how to achieve checkmate with different kinds of pieces. I'll move up to level 4 for the next game. I'm trying to play at least one or two games a day (15-20 minutes per game).
I'm quite enjoying these games. Once I figure out how to play the end game, I'll probably try my hand at some human players online.
I think the reason I find Chess more enticing than Go is that I wrote a computer game years ago (called Dweep) that was strategically similar to Chess. It was only single player, but you had to figure out the right series of discrete moves to reach your goal. The levels were single screen on a 16x10 grid, and every move was completely deterministic, but some levels could take more than an hour to solve. You had to learn to think several moves ahead. Playing Chess reminds me a lot of that game except that now I'm playing against an opponent.
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