Pawnbarian
I often feel like roguelike deckbuilders use a wide breadth of cards in their game to distract from the fact the core gameplay loop just isn’t all that satisfying. So, enter Pawnbarian, a game that doesn’t let you change your cards at all between characters, all you can do is add one of a few different upgrades. Strips away all the noise and gives you satisfying, thoughtful gameplay from the moment you start a run to its finish.
What it delivers is an experience that reminds me of Into the Breach, but with movement/attacks that vary from hand to hand. Calculating out the perfect route through the board to get a few pick offs and avoid damage is incredibly satisfying. Each turn feels like a tight geometric puzzle. The different characters really do feel like different beasts entirely. The titular Pawnbarian gains a lot from getting past the enemies to the final rank, the Knight Templar gets more actions by using more knights, and the Shogun uses pieces inspired by Shogi, which are often a little weaker, but he backs them up with an AoE ability he can power up by killing enemies.
– Real player with 25.8 hrs in game
Read More: Best Chess Turn-Based Tactics Games.
I was privileged to win a copy of this early via Esty’s Misfits giveaway on Twitch (@Esty8nine) - delighted, because I was salivating over this from the ads!
The game is very much as it appears: use your moves optimally, learn opponent moves, build your army, and try not to die of Blight. It’s one of those puzzle strategy games you could open, mess around with for a bit and close again. I’ve since found the 2019 free demo, and it’s true to that- though extra time & development has gone in to make user experience satisfying.
– Real player with 14.5 hrs in game
Wardens
After having played this game extensively since I acquired it, I am posting this review in the hopes of addressing the points made in the negative review above, as the reviewer clearly does not understand the purpose of this game. This is going to be somewhat lengthy, will try to summarize at the top.
TLDR; Pro’s and con’s below. If you came here expecting standalone chess look elsewhere, if you are interested in a sandbox experience where you can create your own units read on.
First and foremost I would like to point out something that I believe is the reason for said reviewers negative perception of this game, and that is that Wardens is NOT chess. If you go into Wardens expecting standalone chess, you will be disappointed. At present the only resemblance this game has to chess is the movement and arrangement of the pieces (for now), and that it is played on a chess board. However, despite one of the default game types being Capture the King, Wardens lacks practically all other basic chess rules, such as en passante, castling, and most importantly, check. As your goal in the aforementioned game mode is to KILL the king, not checkmate him. This was done so as to introduce the concept of the abilities in a familiar way without overwhelming the player. As for the abilities being boring, I admit that I myself do not care for the starting decks. That is because those decks are more useful as templates, to showcase possible abilities and help you to make your own. So the abilities are only as boring as you make them. Granted the amount of things you can do at the moment is a bit limited, but there is a surprising amount of versatility with what is already there. With the tools currently available, I have created over 4 pages worth of cards, with varied abilities including, but not limited to, things such as a unit that when they have sufficient mana they and surrounding allies cannot be frozen, a unit that has an ability that grants permanent attack immunity until next overtake (akin to stealth), and a unit that allows allies to cast their abilities for free provided they have sufficient mana for said ability, although this requires (for now) compatibility to be integrated into the other units in order to work, as does my most recent unit, which will allow nearby allies to cast their abilities for 3 mana less. The list goes on, and it will only improve with time as more things become available.
– Real player with 74.6 hrs in game
Read More: Best Chess Early Access Games.
As a chess player, this looked interesting, but I can’t recommend it. It’s basically just chess, but the pieces have boring abilities, their movement is unchanged. Board readability is terrible, all the pieces (both yours and your opponent’s) look too similar and so everything blends together until you can’t figure out what is happening anymore. There’s no tutorial, and the AI you can play against is terrible, if you’re decent at chess you will easily crush it.
– Real player with 0.8 hrs in game
Chess Evolved Online
The developer is clearly insane, and there are numerous horrific flaws that I assume will never be fixed ever. The good news is that it takes a while for the true gravity of those flaws to start affecting you, and until then you can enjoy this game a lot.
Here is a small sampling of some of the terrors of the past, although they may be gone*, they surely portend of more great sorrow in the future:
1. Turn one checkmate was once possible. Yes it is as bad as it sounds. Although it could be staved off by simply covering ever square within a 3 square radius of your king.
– Real player with 752.7 hrs in game
Read More: Best Chess PvP Games.
Chess Evolved Online is an extremely frustrating game to play, and not for the right reasons. While it has an incredibly compelling base for a game and that is fun for a long time, you eventually get to a level where, at the highest rankings (I am currently in the top 50 as of this review, rank ~4400), you are forced to play only the most boring stally armies or lose a lot of rating because of effective RNG where other armies hard-counter your pieces.
So while I am giving this game a positive review out of support for being much better than most games out there, it still feels dreadful to play due to developer incompetence.
– Real player with 565.3 hrs in game
Eonica Chess Battle
great auto battle game, good graphics
– Real player with 507.4 hrs in game
This is the best chess game I’ve ever played. The amount of depth to the game, while still in early access, is impressive. I think that the game will only get better with time and will have more players to compete against as the game grows in popularity.
– Real player with 7.6 hrs in game
Prismata
The easiest way to describe Prismata is to call it a RTS-themed (think Starcraft) chess. Chess comparison comes from the fact it has 0 RNG of any kind and no hidden info so the game is deterministic i.e. one of the players has a guaranteed win based on the starting positions. But just like Chess, Prismata is incredibly complex where solving it is impossible.
Players start with 6 or 7 Drones that harvest gold (2nd player starts with 1 extra drone to compensate), gold buys you technology structures that produce blue/red/green resources (not official names, but that’s the accepted naming convention in the community). Subsequently gold and tech resources buy attackers/defenders and your goal is to kill opponent’s units while protecting your fragile drones and attackers. Sounds simple at its core.
– Real player with 981.4 hrs in game
EDIT: I almost don’t believe it. Within two days the devs released an update that addressed several of these issues. That’s just awesome. You hardly see that happen for any game these days.
Thumbs up for quality of life updates, and a great strategy game. There’s still room for improvement with drone defaulting to block and such, oh well. Game is good though.
Outdated:
I really want to love Prismata. At a glance, this could be the first truly free to play strategy “card” game without any of the pay to win nonsense, and a potentially fantastic game at that. But for a game that tries so hard to be different than all the others in its genre, why are there so many familiar disappointments?
– Real player with 203.9 hrs in game