just great!
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Chess Mess's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Design | #21 | 4.509 | 4.509 |
Ranked from 55 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Comments
We only managed to finish the first map for the jam. But we have the second in Drive for whoever wants to play it:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1ci9tx9PU11DMxJLgy97HybW07zfi9rf1
This is lovely.
I don't have a great appreciation for chess. I don't have a great appreciation for shuffleboard. Somehow smashing them together has resulted in something with more approachability than chess, and more depth than shuffleboard, like some adorable hybrid puppy made of games I normally don't care for.
My main critiques are 1) it wasn't always super clear which piece I'd be clicking on. This is partially me not utilizing the rotate feature enough, but a highlight would go a long way. 2) Even knowing what the pieces do in normal chess and figuring that you'd try to replicate that, I find it hard to quantify the actual differences between the pieces. I got the impression that making chess more physics based kinda messes with the inherent "value" of a given piece, where value might be represented by [value = mobility * quantity available] Here, though, we throw mass into the equation, rendering it something like [value =( mobility * quantity) / mass)] where mass or lackthereof is a factor that can totally mute a piece's mobility or qualtity. It's a hugely important factor in decisionmaking here, and I found myself wishing for a way to visually identify a given piece type's heft a little more clearly, just by looking at it.
As an aside, I'm one of those people who chronically confuses the queen and king pieces. That's mostly on me, but I definitely found myself wondering why my queen was so sluggish before sacrificing "her" only to discover that I'd lost the game.
It's still lovely though, and it has the distinction of being the only game jam game outside of my own that's going to feature at my next game night. Good show!
and yes, we were trying to also conserve the overall dynamics used in chess (at a low level) where Towers are for agressive movements, Bishops for quick sneaky ones and Horses for covering space although we're still tweaking masses for this purpose. Obviously experienced chess players see the values at a much deeper level but we wanted the game to be approachable as you said :)
How dare you! This game is a disgrace to the art of chess.
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