Buddy this is the best concept I've found so far. I like the art and the sound. I would add more variation to the enemies on the first waves. A tower and two dice makes the game way to easy on the beginning. Good job.

Always love to see a new way to use chess pieces. Pairing them with tower defense is super interesting. Love the graphics & the gameplay. Nice work.

This game is hard :) The art looks really nice. The audio is ok. Gameplay is fun, I like the concept. It's easy to understand. I just wish there were a button you could push to speed up time. Choosing between multiple levels adds variety to your game. Well done!

Firstly the game looks great. While it played well, it was a little annoying how quickly I ran out of money and how slowly I seemed to make it back.

Really cool idea. I had fun trying out the different configurations, but it felt like the best option was always to build a corridor. Not sure if I just wasn't being clever enough. The rhythmic nature of the attacks and the hopping was great, but it would have been nice if there was music to go along with it. The sound effects and graphics are good otherwise though

WOW! This game is awesome! Realy cool looking graphics. Warcraft3 styled Tower-defence gameplay. Well working pathfinding. Multiple maps! Realy good ballance without OP figures. Random dice texture. It's awesome. I spent about 20 minutes playing it, and I'll continue!

Also it'd be Very nice to see competive multiplayer in the future.

Really nice! Enjoyed playing it but it's unclear how much health each chip has or how much damage each chess piece does..

This is very clever. I like the graphics. Sounds are a little annoying. Now I am not the only one who made a chess game. hehe

Great art work and theme!

It's a bit too expensive to build a tower in early stage
I think it would be better if can preview the attack range of the chosen piece. Especially for new player

Great game, a lot of deep strategy in seemingly simple rules. I think some indication of chip health remaining might have been helpful, but honestly that doesn't matter much in the later waves. The one thing that would have been cool was a fast forward, but even so it was a lot of fun and I managed to get to wave 30!

I really liked this - good strategy concept! Simple to play, hard to master.

Never thought a tower defense game has a place in the theme. Mixed with the chess vs chips theme it actually goes really well! The style of it blends well with the whole aesthetic, too!

Though usually the game is meant to be slow, as a Ludum Dare game where rating is usually a gamble of time, it may be too slow. I was at wave 10 with only pawns. I was expecting to place a knight by wave 5.

Other than that, it's nothing new but this is extremely good as an approach to a concept. Great work!

This is such a cool concept! I love how you incorporated the different chess pieces. As others said it is a bit slow, but then again so are most tower defense games. Really well done!

Really fun, and great graphics. Loved the concept! I want to sit down and play more of this; I'm too tired to devise sneaky mazes to efficiently kill chips, but I'm going to revisit it later for sure. The damage highlights on the squares gave great feedback on how the individual pieces were attacking, and the gold value listed above the ghost pieces helped keep the UI to a minimum while still intuitively communicating functionality. A+, will play again!

Great idea and great execution! The concept is really good and it works amazingly well. I really enjoyed this game, I got to wave 20 on the 2nd map before dying. I really believe that this game has amazing potential

nice execution. Really enjoy TD and this brings back memories.

Really nice concept! Some indicators for how the pieces work before they are places would be a good addition, and the sound effects were a bit abrasive. The art is really well done and probably the most unique concept I've seen so far!

Solid tower defence. Fun little twist in using chess moves for the towers. Fun was had, thank you. :)

After the jam, there are few games that want to play more than 1 minute. This is one of those.

I'm not a big fan of tower defense games (I don't hate them either it's just not my cup of tea) But this was a cool game. I also really liked the artstyle and the tileset you used for the dungeon. If you will come back to this game in the future to add some polish or other stuff to the game then a soundtrack would be nice. It was a great experience!

Very fun, unique take on a tower defense game! More addicting then I expected it would be. My only criticism would be it was very difficult for me to earn enough money to try out the later pieces, and it would have been nice to see the attack range when placing them. Awesome entry!

The art and sound are on point. But most importantly, I spent the last 5 songs just playing this game. This is really, really hard to put down! Well done!

well done, will be back for this one

Wave 29. I'm pretty proud of this one. :)

Great concept and art! I was a little confused how the different pieces worked at first and it wasn't clear where I could place them. I don't think I got to the point where I really got to see all the pieces interact, but I feel like there is a lot of potential in this idea.

A bit counter intuitive at times with attack ranges etc. Would benefit a lot from attack previews when placing pieces (both for patterns and timing)

Art style is VERY slick. UI is very nice and the animations are excellent.
Great idea to combine chess and TD. Congrats on the submission.

most addicted ive been to a game this jam

It's not that polished, but It's a very innovative tower defense game using chess and it's pretty fun to play!

Very interesting take on tower defense. And an extremely impressive compo entry! Thanks so much for bringing it by the stream!

Really nice idea with the chess pieces as towers. Rook op!

The gameplay is smooth and refined, rather astonishing for a compo entry, so I could play this for a while. One thing that might be nice is to have the enemies choose one of the shortest paths randomly. It feels a bit disappointing to build a perfectly symmetric mace to have them only go through one half. Maybe that's intended for balance though.

help, I've been playing this for hours

good game :)

I only now realized that you can pick different boards at the start. I was playing that default board for quite some time, hoping I'd level up enough to change the map :|

Great game! Lovely art style too, the animations and interface are so polished for a jam game. And all the extra boards definitely add some spice! (as an aside, that bright hit sound effect is very nice to listen to)

I've always been fascinated with using chess mechanics in other games so this is really interesting! I think it's actually one of the best TD games I've played in a long while too! Great combination and excellent work!

Fun gameplay, tower defense games are mostly a safe bet. Well done!

Really well made tower defence game. Liked the theme and overall graphics.

Well made and impressive compo. Easily the most innovative tower defense game I've played for a long while!

Nice work! I didn't realize those were poker chips for a while... Might have been fun to have the attackers as the white set of pieces.

Really creative use of chess pieces!

Very cool concept! This could definitely be realized into a full game! What an awesome idea. With a little music, some balance tweaks and maybe something to indicate what each piece does before you build it, you could easily charge for this!

I loved this concept! Great re-purposing of chess pieces. The balancing might be slightly off, I felt like I wasn't getting nearly that many coins-per-kill compared to just how much any of the pieces cost, but at the same time on the first level a single bishop swept nearly every wave, so I don't know.

There's good reason this game is so high up. Love seeing Godot games get so much attention.

This was so fun to play, building up more and more pieces and planning out the layout. Really great job.

Amazing game, everything works flawlessly and the concept is great :thumbsup:

Great concept and execution. I was totally drawn into this and found it hard to put down. A few minor things you might want to look at:
- The SFX get repetitive and a little harsh after a while. Perhaps a less sharp sound or reducing the volume could help. Some SFX on hit not only death might also help (although it could be hard to not overwhelm with them). Perhaps putting the sfx on the towers instead of the enemies would help.
- Some ambient background music would also be nice.
- Maybe a tutorial page or something. I didn't know what the towers did until I placed them so perhaps something that gives you a heads up.
- I couldn't figure out if there were differences between the different gems so maybe some differences (eg different speed, health, etc)
- I didn't understand the level selection at first and perhaps putting the levels in terms of difficulty would be helpful (eg 1 = easy, 2 = harder etc)

These are all things that are low priority in a jam game so totally understandable. Really great job though. I loved the graphics. Great gameplay, really fun and additive. Would love to see where it goes! Hit me up on itch when you get an update I'd be happy to playtest it.

Nice job, I dig the visuals. Using chess pieces is a cool twist on the format and it's certainly addictive!

This was a decent execution of a really great idea. I love the art and game design,
Some minor things that I would have liked to see: the poker chip sprites seem to be scaled down and don't seem to fit with the rest of the art. The other thing is being able to tell what moves each piece or going to make in the context of the game. How frequently do the attacks happen, does the attack get stopped by your other pieces? Thank you for making this! I will be back for more :)

It's so fun and innovative! I haven't played many tower defense games but I think this is unique because the enemies have no predefined path and also because the towers or chess pieces are not the usual towers with range. I enjoyed it so much. The UI could have some improvement, like, the cost of the chess pieces should be shown on mouse over.

As far as tower defense design goes, I really like how the ubiquitous AoE damage in this design removes the targeting AI issues that someones affect tower defense games. It makes the game play smoothly and overall is well implemented. Overall it works very well, except sometimes the chips on the screen would stop moving. Perhaps my maze broke them.
https://i.imgur.com/btxODxc.png

Very cool idea. I love seeing chess-inspired games. The only critique I have is that it felt like I had to wait to get more towers, it's more fun to give the player more stuff to play with. I understand that this may have been a balancing issue though. Graphics have a nice feel. I would love to have some chill music on top. I would play this on mobile if it were built out.

Great game and a great concept. Already a big fan of tower defense games. And this one for a game jam is very well executed.Loved playing every bit of it

It's so hard and cool! I love it

Awesome, reminds me of a (winning!) Alakajam entry: https://alakajam.com/7th-alakajam/799/rook/. I really like the bouncy pixel artstyle (like the flowers in our game) and variation in the sound effects. The most frustrating thing is that the pathing of the coins(?) is not always clear and temporarily changes when I place a piece, making if seemingly infeasible to place them during waves. Perhaps just showing the player what the current path is would improve it?

I loved it!
I love tower defenses and you got the idea together with the theme in an ideal way!
This game will be saved on my computer so I can play more!
I have nothing to criticize about the execution of the game. I just missed music, even if it was a few soft chords sounding in the background so as not to disturb the concentration of chess players. : D

Congratulations for the game!

This was a very clever and strategy-laced game. The graphics were very appealing and I loved the fresh new take on the Tower Defense genre but amount of money you got after each wave wasn't keeping up with the growing cost of the towers. This lead to times where the only thing to do was just click the next wave button. The theme worked well for this game and it almost makes me wish there was a theme tie with 1 minute to prepare. So not only would you have to keep your king alive BUT!! you only would have a minute to prepare your defenses! Overall this was a good game!

So far this is the only game this jam I've come back to to kill some time, so take from that what you will. Honestly, with a few more levels this would have fit right in with any of the free flash tower defense games I used to spend hours on. Taking inspiration from chess pieces and how they move is a neat idea, mostly because if the player already understands the rules of chess, then they know approximately how the tower is going to function. The only thing I felt was missing was a clue to what pathing the poker chips would take. Especially on the blank slate first level it was possible to place a tower and have the pathing change in an unexpected way, having you lose very quickly. Showing a dotted line with how the pathing will change while you're placing a tower would be a welcome addition if you decide to revist or update this game in the future.

This is one of my favorite entries this game jam. Please turn it into a full game and port it to ios and android, I would play it a ton! The graphics are gorgeos, the mechanics are cool, the entry fits the theme like a glove. I am just glad I got to play it!

Great job :smile:

Oh and I made it to wave 22! :trophy:


I looooove this game, such a simple concept which just works so well. I've been playing it for a while and am very hooked, trying different tactics, of course getting farther than my brother above ;)

Amazing job, you made something really fun!


As you requested, I played this game on stream for a while. If you'd like to go back and watch again, you can find it at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/603413601 -- thanks for sharing your game!

Really liked this game, very original idea, had a lot of fun playing it

The concept and art are great, but the sfx's and pathfinding is a bit buggy. If you polish it up a bit, you have a good game on your hands. I also noticed that you misspelled "continue" as "conitune".

Cool graphics and the concept! Chess is always a timeless and fun abstract theme having a true working game logic. I would see this game on Google play. I was excepting the pieces to move the location where enemy is instead of invisible attack and battle against the white alliance. Chip-worms were also too colored to my eyes. Dices were awesome add and changing terrain makes this the true long play game!

I really like the graphics style.
I also like when chess is used for cool ideas.

One thing I've noticed is that the rook seems to be more powerful than the queen, because it shoots in the straight line, and even quite fast. Considering that you can trivially and cheaply cause the poker chips to go in straight line, it's a win win. It's much harder to make the queen useful. Unless the queen actually hits harder as well, but that I couldn't really check without any damage indicators.

Another thing that could be improved is the speed up button. This is nowadays de facto standard in TD games and it'd be really useful in this one as well. But it's not that much of an issue for game jam.

All in all, I really like this entry, and particularly for the compo.

Well done!

I see I'm not the only one playing this game for way too long. Good job!

**Wave 41, baby!**


@petturtle - this is absolutely brilliant. My kids and I have been playing this for 4+ hours now :smiley:

I noticed a little typo in the screenshot above. Submitted a pull request to address it. See URL below...

https://github.com/PetTurtle/LudumDare46/pull/1 :eyes:

Great idea! This should seriously be a mobile tower defense game

Hey, this game is very solid. The idea of reusing chess elements for tower defense is clever. It works quite well. Gets a bit repetitive after a while, the sound too, but overall a very good entry which fits the theme. Well done!

Great concept! Thematically I was a bit confused why there's a "dice tower". :)

The weakest part in my opinion was the UI - I would've liked tooltips to indicate how much a tower will cost _before_ I click on it, or even better, just show the prices all the time. I also would've liked a "preview" of the attack patterns _before_ placing a tower. Also, some indication for when hovering over a tile that would block the path if you were to build there.

This is a really unique and addicting idea!

It would've been nice if the game had a proper tutorial, and you were able to unlock new pieces slowly over time as you learn how things work. Background music would've been a plus, too.

:wave_tone1: This game is featured in a blog post highlighting my favorite LD46 games:

**https://github.blog/2020-05-15-ludum-dare-46-staff-picks** `<3`

One day I'll get by Wave 56. _One day..._