Brilliant idea. I really like what you did here. I immediately fully understand all the complex movement mechanics because, you know, chess.

I managed to get the furthest with the green empire lol. I died instantly with the red empire and made it two times with the blue. Love the way you're telling small stories through different runs. I also loved how you were actually able to give feelings loss in the game. Like leaving behind chess pieces who couldn't cross to the end, or if a piece got taken by the darkness.Don't really have any qualms, other than that there felt like there were some rather sharp difficulty spikes in between. Still though, a quality entry from you as always. I'ma play more to see if I can get some different endings

oh i really loved how the story involved the battles and changed according to those, that was super cool!
sometimes i'd lose like after just couple of turns because the last bridges to the other side would get eaten up immediately but that was fine hehe

Really nice game! Had fun playing it, and it's an interesting concept.
Have not much to say except I feel like the difficulty ramps up really fast xD

Brilliant game, you've done it again!

There is a fantastic interaction of resources here, mostly derived from the idea of breaking tiles and that stepping on tiles prevents further breakage. This means that you must consider:
- How to protect your king in normal chess fashion
- How to place units at the boundaries to make sure your playspace remains alive

This meant that there were some incredibly tense fights, especially with a low amount of units, where you needed to do some costly duels, all the while the stage is breaking and you eventually lose. Although this means the game is easier with many units, you are still susceptible to getting hit from multiple angles, which is a natural way to prevent the player from having infinite units. Something like this isn't sustainable:


Other random, interesting points of strategy I saw:
- If you have a pawn you really need to keep a path open for it early. This is very hard in later stages.
- Typically in order to get a kill with the king (due to their slowness), you need to quickly spread out your units to hold the territory. This kinda reminds me of SRPGs where you purposely try to give your weak units last hits to catch them up in exp. With the addition of the breaking tiles this makes it a much more interesting tactic to pull off.
- The 6th or 7th stage where the rook is castled by trees is really clever. Some chess intuition kicks into play here and it summons up old thoughts on the game.

The rotating camera is lovely.

I really sunk my teeth into this game for a while. I didn't even talk about the story and presentation, the gameplay itself has enough cool things to talk about. You added some relatively simple rules to Chess and explored it super well. Excellent game.

this game makes me feel like an absolute genius before i lose my king to a pawn, five stars

@justcamh you did a fantastic job i had a lot of fun playing! nice to know highly skilled and devoted to his job like that! really this kind of innovation ought to happen sooner or later on chess! and you executed it perfectly! loved the game. only thing i am going to recommend is put skip dialog button on keyboard.

I got lucky and managed to beat the game with only the blue army. Very fun game!

A masterpiece! Gameplay, graphics, sound, camera, story. Very hard though, as you mentioned. I keep it on my laptop and will play again for sure!

Great concept! Love the take on chess and the graphics and style is very well done, looks great and enhances the mood very well alongside the sound design.

Well done!

I liked it, ran into a bug though, when it tried to go to green army it skipped to red, then when it tried to go to red the game froze! I made it decently far, knowing the king can capture pieces really helped, though I like how the game unveiled the mechanics as it went.

I had more fun playing the game through for a second time, I think just a simple explanation would have been useful in terms of what you had to complete each level, for me, it's wasn't obvious that you had to move them outside of the board to the right. There are number of scenarios where you can't carry the king across in time due to the ground falling away to quickly or a combination of obstructing opponent pieces. A better indicator of how many turns you have before each part of the ground breaks away would also be useful. I also encountered the game breaking bug mentioned above a number of times. Overall, a solid effort, great atmosphere and the gameplay after some tweaks has alot of potential.

Quite an interesting concept, it is very difficult, I only managed to get half through green and red. But it was pretty fun, the graphics were great and the music set the mood and atmosphere very well, the music was almost eerie and I really enjoyed it. Even though I'm not great at chess, I still had lots of fun.

Nice idea. I liked the idea, but I felt the maps were a little too random. On one try I had no problem getting all my pieces across. On the next level, I had defeated two pieces after two turns, but by the sixth or seventh move, all the floors to the exit were gone. I had one level that was impossible. It only had 2 tiles for the exit they went away within 4 turns. I do think this game has some good ideas and can be fun to play.

@itskdog it sounds like you missed a mechanic, your pieces prevent the tiles around them from decaying. So levels should always be possible if you’re smart about it, move your fast pieces ahead to protect the path for the king. And whilst levels are random, there is an intentional increase in difficulty as you go. This is tutorialised, though I guess you were skipping dialogue?

@peachtreeoath thank you, I’m glad you enjoyed and found some interesting strats!

@taek it really do be like that

Thanks everyone for playing, and sorry for the occasional issues :heart:

I did miss that part about being next to tiles. Was that that in the dialog? Maybe I didn't read it carefully. I knew the levels were getting harder. I'll try it again. Thanks.

A very cerebral entry, and very much innovative! I love it. And hats off to clockmaker for an amazing soundtrack to this. Fit everything together beautifully.

I liked that you force the player to get through the first round before explaining some of the mechanics. A sort of delayed tutorial that grants many "a-ha" revelations. The dynamic script was surprisingly aware and cohesive at times (in the case that you lost multiple pieces in one round). I will say that the king getting "stranded" might have been better highlighted, as I wasn't able to see for sure which route got cut off.

Three really smart mechanics that I liked a whole lot:
* You also implemented such impact by having a regicide result in the next armies progress. It's a nice "replay" feature while also showing you your own skill progression.
* And that their progress starts one level behind (so you don't have to replay a whole lot). Smart again! I will say that my second round of playing went a whole lot better!
* "Capturing" other pieces to build your army. Loved that!

I do wish I got a final look at my progress before the option to replay or quit (for a screenshot) :) Now, I want to know who these "birdies" are and how they know so much about the corruption. Suspicious!!

I am a sucker for chess-like games, so I really enjoyed this. You guys do a really good job establishing the mood and working the story dialogue into the game.

Brilliant! The puzzle is so well done, the mood is on point and it's quite a fun challenge. The dialogue is also pretty funny. One of the best I've seen so far.

Love, love love it! Absolutely amazing.

Quite hard but extremely addicting! Especially for a chess player ;) The in-game atmosphere is amazing. Great job with the game.

This game was super interesting, and a very impressive game to come out of a jam! The overall mood is executed masterfully, with every element of the game contributing to this feeling of impending dread - the music, the little lore bits in between levels, the mostly-dark color palette with only a few accents of color here and there. As for the gameplay, I enjoyed learning the language of this game and figuring out how to prioritize actions. The balancing act of making sure your units don't get captured and making sure you have a path out made every move feel very important.

Chef's kiss :kissing_heart: . The story telling was on point. I had a chuckle at the bird that suggested not listening to other birds. Game play was fun, despite it being chess, the concept of using three parties instead of three hearts was very innovative.

My only concern is performance. My (admittedly not so powerful) laptop made quite a bit of noise even when there were only images and text displayed. It's probably something with the filter, because such simplistic 3d graphics with low res textures usually run fine. Also 125 MB seems like a lot for this game. I didn't manage to win it, so perhaps there's something that I missed that totally justifies.

In any case, great entry congrats!

I am partial to a chess themed game and this really delivered, a little hard to identify what piece is what without looking at it's available squares, great story telling (:

A decent submission as usual, I like such a smart idea.

Congratulations on 5th place!

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