Category Archives: Chess Related

My favorite tabletop Chess variants

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I’ve been thinking a lot about Chess again, since I’m working on that Action Chess remake. Coincidentally, today someone in the BGG abstract strategy games forum asked (paraphrased):

What are your favorite chess variants, and why?

I took the time to write up a fairly lengthy response, and I’ll reproduce the bulk of it (including my recommendations) here.

Losing Chess

Back when I was playing a lot of chess ~20 years ago, (which was before I really thought of myself as any kind of game designer), I played a fair amount of Losing Chess. (I called it Suicide Chess at the time, but I now definitely prefer the name Losing Chess.) I wasn’t yet into “modern” board games, so the “why I liked it” was probably mostly because it felt like Chess but with a totally different objective. It’s also usually a lot shorter than a typical Chess game, so easier to fit more games into one session.

Terrace

Before I played a lot of Chess, a very influential Chess variant to me personally was Terrace. Why I like it: I think, for me personally, it was probably the precursor to the kinds of games talked about in this (the BGG Abstract Strategy Games) forum. It had incredibly simple rules, (at least in comparison to Chess, although on the more complex side for games in the forum). Only one type of piece, (and movement) but in 3 sizes. It was a chess board with a changed topology. (Topology that directly affects piece movement.) And it was playable up to 4-players! Everything about it just felt different, and all in very intentional and interesting ways. What’s more, at the time, (this was in the early 1990s), there was a paper newsletter that was publishing – among other things – variant rules for the game.

Shogi

Earlier this year I was playing a lot of Shogi. As someone who grew up playing Chess, it definitely feels like a Chess variant, but of course that’s obviously subjective. Why I like it: It’s got a slightly bigger board, but there are fewer pieces that move at a distance, so that feels “balanced” not to feel correspondingly more overwhelming. The captures becoming pieces you can “drop” on the board means games feel like they go a little faster than standard Chess (although that might be also quite subjective since my sample size is still quite low relative to Chess). Also, and this might again be my own subjective experience, it appears that Shogi is thought of a little more like a game system than Chess typically is. (Although the fact that we’re talking about Chess variants probably disproves this.) I guess my point is actually that there are well established rules for Shogi at different sizes, and it’s been fun for me to explore that aspect of it.

ChessXGo

In the last month all I want to play is my own game ChessXGo. Why I like it: IMO, ChessXGo replicates the feeling of the most exciting part of Shogi, when you have pieces “in hand” ready to drop on the board. (That’s kind of the whole early game.) It’s a game that feels like both games. And it clearly benefits the player to have played a lot of both games. You will be a better ChessXGo player if you’ve played a lot of Chess, but also if you’ve played a lot of Go. The game does this interesting thing where it morphs from feeling more like Chess to feeling more like Go, and if you play it only thinking about how to capture the King, you will probably lose, because your opponent has a better position for the second half. ChessXGo is why I’ve been thinking a lot about Chess variants again, even though it started as a Go variant. I’m quite happy to have designed a game that mashes up two of the best known and most beloved games of all time… and I’ve been thinking that this is probably my magnum opus.

Thrive

Since I’m talking about my own designs, I’d be remiss not to mention Thrive. I still think it’s a fine game after hundreds of plays. On the “lighter” side – certainly nowhere near the depth of chess – but it has the same bones. Why I like it: I think the whole “each piece is a grid that indicates its own movement relative to the board” idea (that I stole from both Onitama and The Duke) is super interesting, and Thrive is a distillation of that mechanic into a game that lets you focus on just that. (While also making it a variable that changes for each piece, which led to the game’s tagline: “Build your own chess piece with classic abstract strategy game-play, reinvented.”) Speaking of, I also recommend Onitama and The Duke – they are both also commercial Chess variants that are certainly worth playing.

ChessPlus and Paco Saco

If I remember correctly, I slightly prefer the rules of ChessPlus to Paco Saco, but I like them both. (They feel like different explorations of the same concept. The Paco Saco exploration is more interesting, but I think I liked ChessPlus as a game slightly more.) I think I like them both for the same reason. Why? Both allow you to land on other pieces and “combine” them into one stronger piece that moves like both pieces. This concept is certainly not new, of course, as it’s the motivation for a lot of the fairy Chess pieces, but the innovation with these is letting you change the combinations while the game is in progress. I own both of these commercial variants, and for me playing each of them feel quite different. I highly recommend both. (I also own a bunch of nicely produced fairy Chess pieces, although I’ve rarely played with them.)

Katarenga

One of the other forum posters, Russ, described a game called Essentia like this:

Another comes to mind: Essentia (published by nestorgames in 2010). Pieces move like standard chess pieces with standard checkmate goal, but all pieces are physically identical: a piece’s specific type of chess movement depends not on its piece type (since all pieces are identical) but on the type of square the piece currently occupies.

I didn’t know about Essentia before his post, but that description made me think he was talking about Katarenga, which I really love. Katarenga is one of my favorite Chess variants because it’s another example of changing where movement information is encoded. And as soon as you put the movement mechanics on the board instead of the pieces, it makes sense to make the board itself variable, which Katarenga does, so you’re not playing the same game every time. It’s worth going to the game’s website where you can find a bunch of variant rules.

Game Systems

One final note on Game Systems that was not part of my forum reply. I thought it likely I’d already talked on this blog about how much I love game systems, but I did a search just now and I didn’t find anything. I’ve certainly written about specific game systems I enjoy, (and I consider Chess to be one of them!), but I didn’t find anything about game systems more generally. I will have to remedy that someday.

Chessrunner & more Chess Puzzle Games

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Screen Shot 2014-11-05 at 11.42.54 AMChessrunner
Yesterday, my friend Lloyd linked me to Chessrunner (reddit thread), a web-based, chess-inspired endless runner in which you start with only a king, which you have to move forward on an endless chessboard. As you move, you can capture enemy pieces and make them your own. It’s an inspired idea, and one that apparently only took developer/creator Juha Kiili a weekend to implement (in Unity). There has been plenty of positive commentary on Reddit, and hopefully he’ll flush out the idea and (ideally, IMO), bring it to iOS.

Chessrunner’s “timer” mechanic (making it an action puzzle game) is pretty cool in that the gameboard is both expanded (from the top) and shrunk (at the bottom) one square at a time. The opposing colored pieces take one move after every one of your moves. They will ALWAYS capture your king if you give them opportunity, but they are not smart enough to trap you (yet), so surviving is really all about seeing all the attack lines. And that’s why this game really does a good job (IMO) of feeling like something you do while playing chess.

Have I been remiss?
I’ve written before about various chess-inspired puzzle games. (And of course I hope anybody reading this already knows about ActionChess, which was my first app in the app store.) But I realized when I started writing about Chessrunner that there was no way to find those game mentions! (Now there is a Puzzle Chess Games category.) And furthermore, there are several other chess puzzle type games that I’ve played over the last few years that have not (yet) been mentioned here. So I wrote up some mini-reviews:

Pawn’d
IMG_3470Pawn’d (available for $1 on iOS, or in Lite form for free) is a chess & match-3 matchup. I had a very similar design idea for this style of game as a game mode for ActionChess, but I never really put any time into it.

Pawn’d takes the concept in a lot of different directions at once, and looks great while doing it. There are three main game modes, each designed around how the game ends, and each with two more difficult variations called “Blitz” and “Master”. Additionally, there are two introductory modes that have neither variation, one called “Practice’d” (play to a certain # of matches), and another called “Clock’d” (play to a time limit). Each of the modes has its own leaderboards, making something like 22 leaderboards in the whole app. There are also a ton of achievements. Basically, if you like this concept, you can keep playing it for a LONG time without running out of things to do.

This game, possibly more than any of the other ones listed here, is decidedly worth playing, and I’ll cop to getting sucked back into it while writing this.

Chess Tower Defense
Screen Shot 2014-11-05 at 11.41.24 AMI’m fond of telling the story about how, when asked what he thought of ActionChess, my (then 8-year old) nephew Jake replied with “Could you make it a tower defense game?” I LOL’d. Well I think it was less than a year later that you could play Chess Tower Defense over on Kongregate.

It’s graphic design is quite spartan, but the concept is interesting nonetheless. You must survive waves of attacking “things”. (They are not pieces really.) The things don’t attack your pieces, but instead march methodically toward you (downward), passing right through your pawns. Your pawns (and other pieces) can attack them, in the standard directions, and if they don’t, each thing will remove one of your hearts when it gets past your back row. Between waves, you can reposition your pieces, and buy new ones. It’s an interesting concept, and one also worth spending some time playing, if only just to wrap your head around it, I think.

Knight Defense
knight-defense-screen1136x1136Knight Defense (for iPhone or iPad) appeared in the app store about another year or so later. As good as Knight Defense looks, it’s definitely less on the chess strategy end of the spectrum, and closer to the tower defense end. It’s all real-time, so there is no turn based aspect, and you can move your pieces all over the board at will during the game. In each of the squares your pieces could attack in a real game of chess, those pieces may damage enemy pieces. Like other tower defense games, Knight Defense is played in waves, during which enemies will appear at the top of the screen and move toward your king piece, wherever he might be on the gameboard. Though they are shaped like chess pieces, the enemies don’t move or attack like chess pieces, there just run into whichever of your pieces are in front of them, and “damage” them, eventually destroying them. Your pieces can be upgraded to do more damage at once, and to heal them once they’ve themselves been damaged. This is worth playing for chess fans, (especially so for those of you who already enjoy Tower Defense), but it’s not necessarily at the top of my list.

Cheesy Chess
cheesychess_screen1024x1024Cheesy Chess (free with ads for iOS) is not turn-based or action-puzzle at all. It’s more of a static puzzle game where the goal of each level is to get your king to the other side of a small chess board filled with pieces but for one square. In as much of the game as I’ve seen, there were no captures, only moving pieces around in a very cramped and crowded grid. This felt to me like a chess-themed version of Rush Hour (a sliding block game). Admittedly, I’ve played the least of this game. The mouse chess theme is super cute though, and it’s very well-made.

Pit Chess / Recent Addictions

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On Friday, my game designer friend Patrick alerted me to a post over at Play This Thing about Pit Chess. You can play Pit Chess on Kongregate, and it’s essentially a cross between chess and Drop 7. In case you’re not familiar, Drop 7 is a game where pieces with numbers drop from the top of the screen. You have to match up the numbers with positions on the gameboard to remove them from the board and score points. Pit Chess takes the pieces-drop-from-the-top mechanic and adds chess pieces and movement to the whole thing. Pieces drop whenever you make a move that doesn’t capture a pawn. As long as you continue to capture pawns, the screen empties, and you play cleanup for a while. When you inevitably run out of pawns to capture, you go back to capturing other pieces. The game emphasizes alternating between these two modes of gameplay by giving you a point multiplier that goes up as long as you capture pieces that aren’t pawns. There are Kongregate high score tables for highest multiplier, as well as highest scores in the two gameplay modes. I really dig this game, and sort of wish I’d thought of it. (It would have made a great Action Chess game mode!) Then again, I’ve got a lot of stuff I’ve worked on for ActionChess that hasn’t (yet!) seen the light of day.

I’m going to go back to playing fez now. I tweeted about this already, but there are Tetris shaped constellations in the night sky in Fez! I’m not even a fan of platform games usually, (although I played a fair bit of Mario III, and certainly Mario 64 back in the day), but Fez is just appealing to me on so many levels. I was pretty hyped up about it after seeing Renaud Bédard talk about the tech behind Fez at GDC earlier this year, and it’s definitely lived up to my high expectations so far. As an aside, we all have our indie developer crushes. One of mine is definitely Renaud. Check out this list of games he’s worked on!

Three quick Chess-related links

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Hipsta Chez
Is there room for more than one chess-based puzzle game in the app store? Of course there is! I just discovered the TouchArcade post about Hipsta Chez (front-page, no less… it was posted over a week ago, I could easily have missed this!) Hipsta Chez is game in the same family tree as Fuzzle, LinkLines, Gems 3D, etc.. only the twist is that the pieces are chess pieces, and move accordingly. I have only played the first game mode, and only one game so far, but it took over an hour, and I am now 18th on the Game Center leaderboard for that game mode. You can check out a promo video, but I think it’s definitely worth picking up. Hats off to Vasiliy Popov, who appears to be the app’s creator/developer.

Chess@Home
I am not 100% sure how I came across this blog post by one of the developers of Chess@Home, but if it’s to be believed, a few weekends ago, (at Node Knockout, a node.js 48 hour programming competition), a team of four guys created a distributed chess AI using javascript. They’re calling it Chess@Home. The blog post is pretty fascinating.

The forthcoming Octagon Theory app
I read about The Octagon Theory over at my reliable iphone board game blog on BGG. I’m not 100% sure this is chess-related, because I haven’t played the game yet, but it’s an abstract strategy game for the iphone anyway. One of the more interesting things is that they’re soliciting developers to create AI for the thing. I’m tempted to sign up, as that sort of thing is always fun (and I’ve been meaning to learn some lua) for AGES), but there are so many of my own games to work on… we’ll see.