Pixel Chess Idle RPG

Game is pretty solid, W Rin

[h1]What It Says on The Tin[/h1] [i]Pixel Idle Chess RPG[/i] is pretty much exactly what the title suggests: An idle game of chess, with RGP elements and pixel graphics. It might sound like a weird combo, but it pretty much works. Games don't start off with auto-play. Instead, the player has to move pieces forward until you earn enough to purchase auto-play. Eventually, you gain permanent upgrades that give you enough money to purchase auto-play right after a rebirth/prestige. There is also a toggle to turn off auto-play so you can play matches with the computer. You start with just White King and Black King, with you playing White. Each square you move earns gold. Captures of Black pieces (here, called kills) earn more gold. Capturing the Black King results advances you a level. Early on, this includes adding another Black piece to the board, one per level, Pawns first. I can't tell if the chess engine also gets progressively smarter. Gold is invested right back in upgrades, including buying the rest of the White pieces. The RPG element comes quickly into play, as the upgrades include HP and attack. Pieces can attack from any valid movement position. If they do not finish off the piece they attack, they return to their attacking position. Thus, a Queen or Bishop can attack from the other side of the board and stay back there if the piece they attack survives. Pieces also have RPG-ish weakness/strengths. The King is strong against the Pawn. The Pawn, in turn, has another weakness against the Bishop, but is strong versus the Queen. The Queen is strong against the Knight, who is strong against the Rook. The Bishop is weak versus the Rook. Pieces have various passive abilities as well, which need to be purchased with earned gold. Queen boosts morale and thus attack of every piece. Bishop hits harder the further its attack position is. Rook gets a splash attack. Knight doubles its stats. The King gets several abilities, including a small regen per turn, extra gold for its killing moves, and a boost to stats to itself and any piece around it. Another twist here is that Black pieces (but not your own) can spawn as Brutes, which gives them double health and double attack power, and drop double gold. The standard idle game prestige/restart is here. Once you've reached Level 16 (and thus Black has all its pieces), you can rebirth for tokens to invest in permanent buffs like more tokens, more gold to start, and multipliers to global damage and global gold. Of course, you will need to re-purchase pieces and upgrades. Graphics are a DOS throwback. Looks good except that the sprites for the chess pieces could stand to be improved. The King and Bishop are easily confused, as are the Queen and Rook. Pawns look the same size as the other pieces. Another annoyance is that the numbers don't shorten with scientific notation or suffixes or any of the short-number systems used in idle games. They're not even parsed out to the thousands. So the amounts for the gold in the endgame just look like a jumble of numbers. I'm no chess grandmaster, and can only beat a weak AI in the Game Boy Chessmaster game, but I do know the basic rules and a couple advanced techniques. The game's chess engine definitely knows the Pawn's opening move of being able to move two steps forward instead of just one. This includes the [i]en passant[/i] move of capturing a neighboring piece that makes the opening two-space step past your Pawn, at least according to the achievements. However, this isn't easily found in auto-play. Weirdly, the Pawn attacks from both diagonal and forward positions instead of just diagonal as in standard chess. I wonder if that's a feature and not a bug, deliberately left in to avoid two Pawns blocking each other's movement and stranding the King with no bodyguards in the early game, as the game adds Pawns from White's left on both sides. The other advanced move I know is [i]castling.[/i] If the pieces between the King and the Rook (on either side) move out of their starting positions, and the King and Rook haven't yet moved, then the King can exchange places with the Rook. I tried this, and the game engine didn't see it as valid. The game engine does flag a King in check. It also recognizes a piece moving back to a position it was in a move ago, called shuffling, and penalizes you with no gold for that move. When the chess engine catches itself doing that as Black, it doesn't shuffle a third time and tries something else. There are a couple other game modes. One is marked as "Hardmode (Roguelike)." But this had me quickly frustrated. You start over with King versus King and back to square one with the prestige as when you started Normal mode. The Hardmode part comes as you lose gold when you die. A fast sacrifice against Black King thus makes it difficult to gain enough gold for auto-play or early upgrades. The other game mode is Multiplayer, as in PvP matches. However, I never saw nearly enough people online in the late night hours I played the game. However, Normal mode is fine, aside from a couple move quirks, and worth checking out if you have any interest in chess as an idle game.

A very neat idea, and a well made project for a solo dev. Unfortunately, the fun just isn't there for me, at all. The early game (and subsequently, the first BUNCH of rebirths) is painfully, cripplingly slow and boring. You will be spamming a single piece back and forth between the same two spaces, manually, as fast as you can, for 20-30 minutes before anything meaningful can happen.

Idle & Incremental Lovers reviewed Pixel Chess Idle RPG and gave it a neutral review: [i] Neutral review. Thumbs up for some really good ideas, but ultimately you'll just be clicking on upgrades and idling. You'll nearly never be playing chess, the (really) dumb autoplay takes care of it. [/i] *** This is a tricky one, cause players usually have the expectation to use their brainpower a lot when it comes to chess. This is more an OK incremental game with simple numbers go up features, but the active chess part is minimal. + There are some really cool features coming from the RPG genre : HP, damage, vampirism, special abilities. + There is some fun in watching the game autoplay, especially since the computer (as both players) probably has a minus 1000 Elo ranking. Will I prevail, or will I epicly fail? + Based on the game you just lost, you can choose your upgrades a bit more wisely to answer the "puzzle" (as the same game goes on over and over again if you do nothing). So there's a bit of tactical play, but more in the "upgrade" part than in the "chess" part. +/- No ending, it goes infinite. Whether you like it or not is a matter of personal preference. - The quickest way to get the autoplay perk is too boost your king gold earn and to frantically move back and forth between two squares. That's one thing game devs in general should be more aware of: if there's a boring but more efficient way to play your game, players will use it and be mad about it. - The passive income perk needs a nerf (or better, to be sent into oblivion haha). It's not particularly fun and once you get it, you don't care anymore about upgrading the gold earn from your pieces (which is also passive since you have autoplay, but way less rewarding). - The prestige system is very boring, with only four "basic multiplier" perks. *Why did the chess player cross the road? He saw a mate.* Found this review helpful? Give it a thumb up and follow my curator page for more Idle & Incremental games recommendations : [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/46077092-Idle-Incremental-Lovers/]Idle & Incremental Lovers Curator page[/url]

good game, still has some stuff to be ironed out but its a good time killer. its a really fun game, the premise is you're basically playing chess but instead of having normal moves you're having the pieces have a turn based fight kinda like a regular rpg. moving and taking out pieces lets you earn gold which you can use to upgrade your king or even buy more pieces. Eventually you get to unlock the auto fighter and passive income which allows you to activate the IDLE portion of the game so you can just leave it running over night. once you get all pieces unlocked the turn based system on its own is pretty fun so you might not always want to leave auto fight on. in short its a fun game with lots of progression and a little bit of strategy, very good game 8/10.

Dosen't obey the rules of chess movement. I.E. pawns attack forwards.

I am not that bad at chess, unfortunately that does not matter playing this game. Its okay I guess but nothing special. Tends to be very grindy. Its okay for the bucks but I am not invested.

Great game! i love the mastery system and the abilities. i do hope to see more in the future, especially to the tokens! one thing, the auto player does not take the rook ability info effect lol. i found a strategy where i dont buy bishops and knight or pawns, and i just castle, rook to f7, rook to f8 killing the king with the shock! the autoplay fails to see that. very annoying! hard to level up by hand