All chess program today have a collection of moves that are stored in a filed referred to as the Opening Book. These are moves well-known to human players, have typically been played for decades or even centuries, and represent logical continuations from their parent positions. The Gothic Vortex program uses the same type of technology. For any particular position, there may be several very good moves. The program stores each of the "best" replies, and for the sake of variety, it will select them randomly to keep game play lively and interesting. All of the moves shown in the move list above and on the right were played instantly in response to white's moves. Then the computer began searching, and next it will play the Bishop on c1 to the b2 square.

The Gothic Vortex Opening Book also contains positions that represent traps. These are positions where the opponent has "fallen for" a move that was essentially "bait," and now the book has an incredibly strong attack (or counter-attack) as a set of pre-programmed replies. Not only that, in many cases, it has ALL of the reasonable replies already mapped out until "certain doom" has been reached. And, should you try to evade the book, the program's search engine switches on, and it starts to calculate a brute force reply that will end the game even more quickly.

This version of the Opening Book contains over 36,000 moves played from the years 2003-2019 from some of the strongest Trice's Chess players to have played the game. This wide variety of play is sure to instruct and entertain Trice's Chess enthusiasts of all ages and abilities.