The Rookery

I came into The Rookery with a spreadsheet mentality and left with something closer to a Slay the Spire addiction. The setup sounds niche on paper: take a chess board, strip out everything players find tedious about classical chess, and replace it with a run-based upgrade loop full of outrageous abilities. What you actually get is a decision tree that would satisfy any build-order obsessive. Every run starts lean. You pick up boosts, relics, and consumables as you progress, and the choices compound fast. Do you commit early to a pawn-flood strategy, leaning on pieces like Omnipawn and Pawn Factory to generate cheap material that snowballs? Or do you rush queen generation and bet that your late-game board presence overwhelms whatever the final boss throws at you? Those are genuinely different strategic lines with different win conditions, and the relic synergies that emerge between them are the kind of thing that keeps a run log open in a second tab. The difficulty architecture here deserves real attention, because it is the main reason this game works for such a wide range of players. There are 40 ascension levels, but the framing matters: higher ascensions mostly pile restrictions onto the player rather than simply buffing the AI. That is a philosophically sound design call. It means a 550-Elo chess player and a 1900-Elo chess player can sit down with the same game and find appropriate pressure without the experience diverging completely. The tutorial respects you enough to get out of the way quickly, and the early ascensions are genuinely forgiving enough for players who have never touched competitive chess. If you have bounced off chess in the past because the meta felt like homework, this is worth reconsidering. The bosses are where the friction concentrates, and that cuts both ways. Each boss carries a single signature trick, which makes their logic readable once you have faced them a few times. The Draco encounter, which constrains your pieces to adjacent-square movement, is the most divisive: pawn and material-generation builds find it nearly trivial, while bonus-move builds get punished hard. Rook and Queen modifier fights at higher ascensions have drawn legitimate complaints about back-rank exposure, where the AI can thread checkmates before you have the energy to drop defensive reinforcements. The developers are active in discussions and the balancing conversation is ongoing, but at high ascension counts some encounters still feel more arbitrary than tactical. One-trick builds also get dismantled by boss design intentionally, so the game actively nudges you toward flexible relic stacking over narrow specialization. Production quality is a genuine bright spot for an indie at this price tier. The UI is clean and responsive, ability descriptions are readable, and the music holds up across long sessions. Community reception sits at 95% positive across a small but vocal Steam player base, and players with over 100 hours logged still report finding new viable strategies, which is the metric I trust most for roguelite longevity. There is no mod ecosystem to speak of and no multiplayer, so the replayability lives entirely inside the run variety. For the genre that is fine, and the 40-level ascension ladder gives dedicated players a structured climb. Mac support exists, though Intel Mac users should note compatibility restrictions apply. If you treat chess as pure tactics rather than theory, The Rookery extracts exactly that part and wraps it in a tight roguelite shell. It is not a perfect balance pass at every ascension level, and some modifier encounters will frustrate players who prefer predictable odds. But the core loop is genuinely deep, the accessibility floor is low, and a 100-plus hour ceiling for competitive players is hard to argue with.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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