How would you play chess if the board was a magical fantasy world? Command living chess pieces across four strange realms, use the terrain as a weapon, and gather allies with incredible powers. A single-player tactics game where you win by building your best synergistic army.
ChessWorlds is a single-player tactics game where the pieces are alive and the board is a place you travel through. Your pieces climb hills, drop off ledges, and fight across terrain that has real impact on tactics. You win by reading the board and putting together an army whose pieces cover for each other.
I am building this because I have loved chess variants for years (Chess Evolved Online was my favorite for a long time), but I always wished I could make my own pieces and fight across a world instead of a flat grid. So that is the game.
The terrain is a weapon
Enemies hide in the bushes, there is a danger to fall in lava, water floods tiles and still-water freezes whatever lands in it. A tsunami's wake can wash a whole row of pieces out of place. Mechanical lifts rise and drop and change who can reach what. And a Blight creeps in from the edges of the map and eats it out from under you if you are too slow.
Every piece still moves the way it does in chess, but the battlefield has height now. A piece can climb one tile up to reach a square, and the knight jumps, so it climbs two. Standing above an enemy lets you strike downhill, and standing on a ledge means someone can shove you off it.
Four realms, four new chess worldviews
You play a king whose kingdom fell in a single night. You wake up outside the ruined walls with no army left, and you set out to build a new one. Every realm you reach fights differently.
Humans, the classic pieces you start with. On a 3D board you can face any direction, so I gave the pawn its moves mirrored to every side.
Elves live in the forests, hide in cover, and strike from a distance.
Dwarves are tough warriors, shove enemies off ledges, and forge shields to weather a charge.
Mermaids reshape the field with water and drag your pieces out of position.
Constructs are clockwork. They stack on top of each other into stronger forms and queue up actions that go off a few turns later. They are is inspired by Gungi from Hunter x Hunter.
In the endgame, you will fight the Demons that took over the human kingdom.
Between battles you head back to the hub and spend what you won at the Guild shop, hiring new pieces into your army.
Design your own pieces
This is the part I am most excited about. There is a visual, block-based workshop where you build your own chess pieces out of the same blocks the game's own pieces are made of. You snap together how a piece moves and what it does, watch the preview update as you go, then hit [b]See it in action[/b] and drop it into a test battle to try it out.
Where the game is at
I am making this in the open and it is still growing. If it looks like your kind of game, wishlist it and follow me in this journey. It honestly helps a lot.
Official site
On Steam
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