Gigachess

I don’t think I’ve ever said about a game that it’s a puzzle hero defense with altered chess gameplay. Well, I can now because that’s what Gigachess is. It’s a turn-based tactics game in which you use chess pieces to survive an ongoing pawn invasion.

Gigachess is certainly an original concoction. Chess is great, hero defense games are mostly fun, and survival gameplay is always challenging. The rules of this game are well balanced, and it all comes together wonderfully.

You have to defend your side of the board from the pawns that march towards it. If they reach it, you lose lives, and it can quickly end in a loss. You can choose and combine three hero chess pieces to fight for you, knight, rook and bishop, all of which move and attach almost exactly like in chess.

The pieces move just like in the original board game, but when it comes to attacking, you can jump over pawns to get to the ones that present the most danger. To make things a bit more interesting, there are three kinds of power-ups to use. One creates a temporary wall that halts the enemy movement, you can upgrade a piece to a Queen status, and there are mines that can be planted to blast the little pawns away.

Gigachess is one heck of a tactics game. It’s kind of tough to describe how things can go very wrong very fast. Playing in easy mode, you barely break a sweat but crank up the difficulty level a bit, and you start to see why this little game is great.

Just like when playing chess, in Gigachess you have to think things through. One simple mistake can cost you the game. Having the power-ups is useful and being able to revive fallen pieces even more so but in most cases, all of that might not be enough to repair the damage that’s been done.

Right now, Gigachess is in its early stages of life but even so, it’s very interesting and fun to play. It feels like something is missing, I can’t put my finger on exactly what, but with a creative start like this, it’s surely going to turn up great when its final polish is applied.