Royale With Chess

Might & Magic: Chess Royale sends the auto-battler into turbo-drive.

- Alistair Jones

On the face of things, this feels like the kind of game that should never have been made, an amalgamation of ideas and franchises that should barely occupy the same publishing house, let alone be drawn together in the same studio. But for all the ways in which Might & Magic: Chess Royale seems from afar like an affront to everything that lead to its eventual creation, it’s actually a refreshingly pared-down take on an emerging genre.

For the most part, Chess Royale lives pretty straightforwardly up to its title. Leaning heavily on the Might & Magic franchise to provide a little extra validity, it places a relatively unambitious autobattler (the genre birthed by the likes of Dota AutoChess or Teamfight Tactics) into the vaguest-possible battle royale (Fortnite, PUBG) framework, encouraging 100 players to fight it out for top spot. It’s an amusing gimmick to add to a new genre, but it does little to change the way players interact with one another. When all your autobattler competitors are already last-man-standing affairs, bolting the word ‘royale’ to the end of your title isn’t exactly revolutionary.

Nevertheless, adding more than 90 extra players to the usual formula does change things up a little. Rather than a traditional health bar,