A Game of Chaess Review

A Game of Chaess is a casual turn-based strategy title developed by Yohan Fabre, also known as Gamezel, and published by Klaas Jongsma. It takes place in a fictional world in which everyone is a chess piece, so as someone who plays quite a lot of chess, naturally, I wanted to try it out.

The game has a simple story you can go through, although it’s not really important, and you can just skip all the dialogue if you’re not interested. You play as the White King, who wanted to just live out the rest of his days peacefully after defeating the Black King, or as referred to in the game, the Lord of Darkness. Unfortunately for him, the latter doesn’t want to stay defeated and decides to try to conquer the world once again.

From then on, the story plays out in a pretty straightforward manner; it’s not confusing at all nor very interesting, though not horrible either. Some dialogue contains jokes, most of which are just kinda corny and not very good, although a few of them did get a chuckle out of me. I wouldn’t play this title for a narrative, then, but it doesn’t ruin the experience either.

Now, the gameplay is hard to form a solid opinion on — at its core, it’s just chess. But there are some extra rules; the pieces are arranged differently, and the board position stays the same even between different matches. One of the most important differences is that certain actions can earn you XP, and once you level up, you get “reinforcements”, which are just a selection of pre-determined pieces you can add to your side. Additionally, the enemy pieces all get a move, while you can only move one piece at a time, which adds to the difficulty.

It seems good at first, but it’s honestly super annoying, especially if you play chess regularly. Since the board position stays while more enemy pieces arrive, a lot of strategies just don’t work, and it’s mostly about tactics. Also, the enemy AI is absolutely horrible at this game! The only times I’ve lost were when I was completely distracted and left with only my king, and even then, I didn’t have to change what I did that led to only having my king; I just had to pay more attention and take all the enemies with it. Not only is that super disappointing, but if you do lose, you also can’t just restart the match you lost — you have to restart the whole chapter (or “Kingdom” in-game), which takes you a bunch of levels back and is really annoying if you already know how to beat all the enemies and just have to go through the motions.

As for how A Game of Chaess looks, well, it looks like chess. There’s some interesting pixel art during cutscenes, but most of the experience is looking at a board. Nothing bad about it, it’s not like I hate chess boards for some reason, there’s just nothing noteworthy to mention about the graphics in this title.

There’s no voice acting throughout the experience, although there are those speech sounds that are present in most indie games. There’s also some nice music, but just a few hours later, I completely forgot how it sounds, so it’s definitely not anything to write home about. There are basic chess SFX, which, as you could have guessed, are not noteworthy due to just being standard chess sounds.

Overall, then, A Game of Chaess isn’t particularly bad, but there’s just nothing to really enjoy as a videogame. Any interesting game mechanic is overshadowed either by how easy the AI is to beat or how annoying losing is due to the amount of mindless redoing you have to go through. I came into it expecting some interesting play on the thousands-year-old tabletop game in a similar way to what Balatro did to poker, but honestly, it only made me want to quit the game and go play standard chess.