Checks and balances

What is it about chess that keeps indie developers coming back to the board?

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Among the first games published by the newly founded Electronic Arts in 1983 was Archon: The Light And The Dark. An action/strategy hybrid, it pitted two armies against each other; deployed on either side of a black-and-white chequered board, they would move in turns and duke it out in realtime whenever they met on the same square. It was a massive success yet didn't kickstart a new chess-like subgenre. For decades, the industry remained more interested in deep simulations or securing marketing-friendly licences to embellish traditional chess titles than in messing with the game's principles.

Recently, however, priorities have changed, as Tim Keenan, creator of Below The Crown, discovered. Keenan's latest resulted from more than a decade of mulling over an idea to fuse what he describes as the “elegant determinism" of chess with the unpredictability of Magic: The Gathering. The result blends Roguelike elements with a spin on chess mechanics, whereby your wizard king 'casts' a new piece on the board each turn, creating a series of spatial puzzles tied together with end-of-level upgrades, boss fights and a cryptic, Inscryption-inspired narrative layer. Yet his reinterpretation is far from a one-off. When the Steam algorithm caught a whiff of it during a Next Fest, he was bombarded with recommendations: "I was scrolling through my personal feed and it was like, 'You enjoy chess games?' And it presented 11 demos."