Zillions of Games is a "universal gaming engine" and game creation suite. The creators designed a gaming engine that can be given a board of any size and any dimensions, that can be have pieces with any capabilities, with any objective, for any number of players, and the engine can analyze the legal moves and attempt to solve the puzzle or find the best move. There are specialized engines for playing chess or checkers or backgammon, Zillions' general engine can play virtually any board, card, or dice game. ZoG has a simple language for defining a playing field, the legal moves for any number of pieces, the starting position, the conditions for win-lose-draw, and any graphics and sound effects, allowing an infinite number of games to be created, and instantly providing a computer opponent. The computer can also assist game development by playing against itself to test if the game is balanced or if one side has an advantage. The objective of the game doesn't have to be capturing the king, or all of an opponent's pieces; the objective can be positional, like getting a piece to the end of the board in Snakes and Ladders, or visiting every position on the board in the Knight's Tour. The only limitations on the rules of a game are that there are no time-based events, and players cannot play at the same time; ZoG is for playing turn-based games, not video games. Still, as one player put it, "Zillions is a program where you can create a brand new game, and it can already kick your ass at it." I started writing games for ZoG in 2002, and there are hundreds of free games to download from ZoG's website. ZoG also comes with hundreds of games that were developed in house, most of which are traditional games (i.e. checkers, chess, go, reversi, tic-tac-toe), and a huge library of graphics and sounds that can be used to create new games. The demo doesn't allow loading of third-party games, and locks some of the most popular variants of the included games. There are over 350 games in this program, with only 48 playable in the shareware demo.

Downloads

Zillions of Games v2.0.1 Demo (21,685,707 bytes)	9 May 2003	Win9x
Zillions of Games v2.0 Demo (21,670,388 bytes)	14 December 2002	Win9x
Zillions of Games v1.3.1 Demo (9,125,653 bytes)	17 June 2001	Win9x
Zillions of Games v1.2.3 Demo (9,068,312 bytes)	4 January 2001	Win9x
Zillions of Games v1.1.1 Demo (Still searching)	12 December 1999	Win9x

Help running Win9x games

Availability

Zillions Development still sells the registered version of this game for $34.98 on CD-ROM or $24.98 by download.