Chess, Texas

This game makes chess fun. You play a variety of openings, puzzles, end-games, goofy positions, alternate board setups, and traditional games -- with a few extra tools to take the edge off the AI when it decides to play like Stockfish for 20 turns straight. The game gives you limited, consumable items that you can use (totally optional) to see what the engine thinks is the best move; or to encourage the AI to blunder; or to just take back a bad move and try the turn again. I'm not sure these mechanics completely solve the issue of how much your opponents' elos swing from the beginning of the game to the end... but its a fun and useful band-aid for it. Some complaints: Opponents are way harder by the last 2/3rds of the game than they started at, and it feels like the elo progression is plainly unrealistic. Chess is a life-long game. No one is going to start at 700 and end at 1600 in the course of playing a title like Chess, Texas. But that's what it feels like the difficulty curve is asking of you. And there are some bugs creeping around in here. In the non-standard board setups, I've seen the AI castle THROUGH its own pieces. And I just had the experience of playing a m…

- Walk all the way back on every loss instead of restarting - Can't get items back - Cannot retry if you stalemate so you lose rewards permanently - Blanks are not always functional. Their purpose is to make the opponent make a random move, but the opponent will frequently make a very strong move, meaning you wasted an item for nothing. - 3 Move Repetition rule is not programmed, meaning draws will not happen when they would in real games - Games hints will often not be very good. Honestly can't recommend.

Roughly programmed, AI usage, frustrating opponents. Good in theory, awful in practice.

Good premise, and not without charm, but lazy and badly designed/balanced (among other issues, a major one is that the Blank powerup is busted, basically guaranteeing an easy victory even on Impossible difficulty if used at the right time), with a strong AI slop smell. I would love to be able to change this to a thumbs up, as this is the only RPG (loosely speaking) I'm aware of that uses my favorite turn based strategy game of all time as its battle system, but it's gonna take some hefty updates from the dev.

Even though there's some bugs and programming mistakes, i think it's a very fun game to anyone that loves chess

YES CHESS YES