Chessarama

I went into Chessarama expecting a dressed-up chess tutorial with a coat of paint. What I got instead was eight mechanically distinct puzzle games that each isolate a single chess concept and then push it somewhere unexpected. That is a genuinely interesting design brief, and Minimol Games, a Brazilian indie studio with a clear affection for the source material, mostly pulls it off. The campaign structure is the core of the package. Farm Life opens things up by turning the Knight's Tour - that classic problem of visiting every board square exactly once using L-shaped moves - into a crop-planting exercise across irregularly shaped fields. It sounds pedestrian, but the optional secondary objectives that require you to finish on a specific tile are the kind of constraint that makes you rebuild your mental model from scratch. Street Soccer is the mode that earns Chessarama its reputation: you chain pieces together using their attack ranges to route a ball into a goal, then the game starts adding cones and goalkeeper obstructions. The spatial logic required here is genuinely fresh. Lady Ronin reframes the Queen as a Sokoban-style assassin who must maneuver through enemy formations and pick off unprotected targets in sequence, which produces some of the toughest and most satisfying puzzles in the whole collection. Dragon Slayers, where pawns need to be promoted while surviving dragon fire breath, is the weakest link - the ruleset is under-explained and the tutorials do not fully close the gap. Progress is gated behind an XP system that forces you to replay and grind earlier modes before unlocking later ones. From a strategy-design perspective this is a questionable call: the best content (Lady Ronin, Last Stand, Knight Supreme) sits behind hours of the simpler stuff, and the pacing drag is noticeable. Each mode also comes with a Battle variant where you face an AI opponent using the same ruleset in a more competitive format, though reviewers broadly find the campaign puzzles far more engaging than these AI bouts. A Classic Chess mode with online play is tucked in as well, though it feels supplemental rather than essential to what makes this game worth buying. Achievement hunters should note that launch-period bugs caused some achievements to fire incorrectly - check current patch notes before committing to a full completion run. Presentation is a genuine strength. Each puzzle is rendered as a miniature diorama with small ambient animations - tractors rolling past, leaves falling - that make staring at a stuck position considerably less punishing. The art is clear without being sterile, which matters when you need to read piece positions accurately under pressure. The music loops quickly enough that muting it is a reasonable option, but it never actively grates. On the accessibility side, the interface is clean and controller support works well on PC, though early console versions had cursor-sensitivity complaints that patches have since addressed. For strategy players who have never properly engaged with chess, this is one of the more honest on-ramps available. The game does not pretend to teach you classical opening theory or endgame principles - it teaches you how individual pieces think, which is actually the harder conceptual lift for most beginners. If you already know your way around a board, the optional challenge objectives in each level have enough teeth to hold your attention, even if the total puzzle count per mode leaves you wanting a second helping. The XP grind and a handful of under-tutorialized modes keep this short of being a complete recommendation, but the core idea is sound and the execution is good enough that the rough edges are irritating rather than disqualifying.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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