Chessboard Kingdoms

I want to like what Hashed Egg is doing with Chessboard Kingdoms, and the core idea genuinely has legs. Take chess movement rules, strip out the 8x8 constraint, drop in catapults and trebuchets, let you raise walls and gates, and suddenly the familiar bishop-diagonal becomes a threat calculation you have to weight against an incoming artillery barrage. That is a legitimately fresh angle on turn-based tactics, and on paper it should appeal to anyone who found pure chess too sterile but finds most tactics games too busy. The unit roster is where the design earns its keep. Standard chess pieces handle movement the way you expect, but the Wizard unit bends those rules hard: position him correctly and enemy pieces inside his area of effect have their movement and attack paths altered, forcing opponent repositioning mid-plan. Engineers give you siege options - catapults and trebuchets for cracking fortified positions - while Barracks, Wizard Towers, and wall sections function as stationary pieces that reshape the board geometry every match. Two distinct factions, a Western kingdom and an Eastern sultanate, add asymmetric flavour without overcomplicating the learning curve. Map variety includes layouts like Ancient Maze, with heavy elevation changes and choke-point corridors, and the flatter Swamplands, which push up to five players into aggressive early contact. A top-down isometric camera mode is available for navigating denser terrain, which is a practical touch. Here is where I have to be straight with you though. This game has two user reviews on Steam. Two. It launched out of Early Access in November 2019 and the online community never materialized in any meaningful way. Capture the Flag multiplayer and the four-player free-for-all modes are the most interesting things on offer, but both depend entirely on you having friends willing to install a low-visibility indie title, because finding a random match through any public lobby is a genuine uncertainty. The AI is present for solo practice, but community feedback noted the spectator and all-AI match options were limited at launch, which undercuts the offline value loop. If you own this as part of a bundle or you have a dedicated group of three or four strategy-minded friends who want something unusual for async or synchronous sessions, the mechanical foundations are solid enough to hold an evening. Going in expecting a living online ecosystem would be a mistake the player count makes obvious. The concept outpaced the audience, and that is a shame, because the siege-plus-chess hybrid has more depth than most chess variants bother to attempt.

Fred · Scout Team

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