Chess, but it snowballs.

Crown & Coup is a single-player roguelike built on chess bones: every run you draft a small army, deploy it on the board, and besiege a series of score targets. Captures earn might, stratagems multiply it, and the numbers climb from "polite opening" to "the scoreboard needs more digits."

THE BOARD IS THE RUN

Battlefields grow with your legend - from a knife-fight 3×3 all the way to a sprawling 12×12. Each act ends in a boss siege that bends the rules against you. Deploy from a drafted pool, spend a limited stock of moves, and decide every siege: bank your score and cash out, or hunt the enemy king for the checkmate jackpot - miss, and the unused moves you gambled are gone.

BUILD AN ENGINE OUT OF AN ARMY

• 117 stratagems - passive war-machines that trigger on captures, chains, files, sacrifices, and stranger things. Six at a time; order matters; nonsense combos are the point.
  
• 14 runestones to socket into individual pieces - your pawn, but it strikes twice and returns home; your rook, but it pays rent.
  
• Grimoire rituals, omens, planetary charts - 40+ one-shot and run-warping modifiers that reroll what "chess" means this run.
  
• 9 monarchs, each with a racial passive that pushes a different playstyle - from grinding fortress economies to blood-rage tempo.
  
• Banners rank up your piece types run over run; decrees and proclamations let bosses and you rewrite the battlefield's law.

A SHOP BETWEEN EVERY BATTLE

Spend siege spoils on stratagems, rune packs, and rituals. Reroll, plan around rarity, and decide whether this run becomes a cavalry-charge tempo build or a pawn-chain doomsday engine.

NO CHESS HOMEWORK REQUIRED

If you know how the pieces move, you're armed. The enemy army follows real movement rules, but this isn't a game of grandmaster calculation - it's a game of building something so unreasonable that calculation stops mattering. (Chess players will still find their line-of-attack instincts paying dividends.)

FEATURES

• Runs of 30–60 minutes across escalating antes and boss sieges
  
• 150+ collectible modifiers across five systems, with an unlock track that feeds discoveries into future runs
  
• Cash-out ceremonies, score races, and a mate-hunt gamble every siege
  
• Crisp pixel-art armies on a CRT-warmed battlefield, board sizes 3×3–12×12
  
• Quality settings and adjustable game speed