Warhammer 40,000: Regicide

My first instinct when I loaded this up was pure curiosity: chess, but with Blood Angels Terminators and Orks blowing each other apart on an 8x8 battlefield. That instinct paid off in the short run, but there's a hard ceiling you'll hit fast, and in 2025 there's a practical problem to sort out before you even get there. The game runs two distinct modes. Classic is exactly what it sounds like - standard chess rules, Warhammer skins, brutal kill animations when a piece is captured. It works. The Regicide mode is where the concept actually stretches its legs. Each turn splits into two phases: a movement phase that follows chess positioning logic, then an Initiative phase where you spend a pool of three points on unit abilities. Space Marine Assault Marines, Terminators, Librarians, Weirdboyz, Lootas - each piece maps to a chess role but comes loaded with its own toolkit. You can open fire on enemies within range, trigger psychic powers, use buffs and debuffs, or burn points on player-level abilities that affect the whole board. The 50-mission campaign follows Captain Dracomedes and the Blood Angels fighting Orks across Hethgar Prime, with objectives that go beyond simple checkmate - hold positions, wipe specific squads, survive pushes. It's genuinely enough structure to teach you the system before you go freeform. The cracks are real though. The Initiative phase introduces a hidden dice roll behind every ranged attack, which means a perfectly positioned Loota can one-shot your Assault Marine on pure chance. Chess purists will find that deeply offensive. The AI handles the movement phase well - it thinks ahead and punishes positional mistakes - but it never adapts to the unpredictability of special abilities, so once you learn to abuse the Initiative phase the AI difficulty feels inconsistent. There are only two playable factions (Space Marines and Orks), the campaign maps repeat visually, and each unit type has a single kill animation that you will have memorized within an hour. PC Gamer called it "a cute chess set for 40K fans," which is both accurate and a little damning. Here is the thing that changes the buying calculus entirely: the game was de-listed from Steam and its online servers were shut down in October 2022. The multiplayer - leaderboards, online matches, asynchronous play - is dead. What you are purchasing through a third-party key reseller is a single-player experience that requires a community-made offline mod just to bypass the login screen and reach the main menu. That mod exists, it works, and the offline campaign remains intact once you apply it. But that is a non-trivial hoop, and anyone who doesn't know going in will hit a wall immediately. If you're comfortable installing a fan patch and your expectations are limited to the campaign plus local hotseat skirmishes, the core chess-with-guns loop holds up. If you wanted to play ranked matches against humans online, that ship sailed years ago. Regicide is one of those games that did one thing genuinely clever - the two-phase turn structure gives chess a tactical texture that tabletop hybrid fans will appreciate - but never had enough content around that idea to sustain it long-term. A decade on, with servers dead and only two factions ever released, it feels more like a proof of concept than a complete product. Worth it for the curious 40K fan who goes in clear-eyed about what remains playable.

Alex · Scout Team

Catch-all

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