I suck at chess

A really need spin on an ancient classic! I may be bad at chess but this is a fun way to experience it. I ended up with a *ton* of knights. I honestly don't know if there were any pieces besides knights and pawns. If you are supposed to get other pieces, maybe do a pseudorandom process that prioritizes pieces you don't have yet. Anyway, great game here!

this is really cool! Impressive that there are enemy AI chess moves in a jam game

I love chess, and this is a really fun twist! Had a blast with this game, great submission!

Great spin on the roguelite genre. The computer AI didn't seem too smart, but that's ok because I'm terrible at chess. Some of the abilities maybe felt a bit overpowered but it just helped me build up my confidence. I had a lot of fun playing it.

Great work.

Wow this is actually really awesome! Using chess for this was a great idea.

A nice take so summon chess pieces.

Overall a nice mechanic.

Maybe a little hint when trying to do an illegal placement to explain why it is blocked would be nice. (From my understanding you can't place a new piece if it would be possible to take another piece in one move)

I think this is a great basic premise to explore it more in a bigger game.

This is a cool little game, the ui is so clear and nothing needed explain for me to get what I had to do, I like the constant progress forward too, its a clever use of chess moves to make a little strategy game without all the complexity of a full game of chess! Nice job ^^

Very addicting game. The first time I played, I got the pawn get queen movement upgrade after the first wave and it made the game too easy and I restarted. It's a cool concept I haven't seen before. One surprisingly challenging aspect turned out to be keeping my super upgraded pawns away from the border, that turns them into inferior knights. Getting a bunch of knights made the game harder.

@merb1000 when you stack the same pieces, they become a different piece (two knights become a bishop, two bishops a rook, etc)

My favorite game of the jam. I love the concept of roguelite chess!!

This is solid! I love the aesthetic! I'm not going to pretend I'm good at chess but it was intuitive because the moves are labelled on the board for me :)

The active effects are *very* powerful. My pawns got queen moves right off the bat and it made everything quite trivial. Then they also got knight moves and had basically free movement around the board.

Made it feel less like I was surviving waves, and more like I was an unstoppable invading horde of superpawns.

Well put together though, I had fun.

Simple, clean and interesting gameplay design. Well done.

I'm a sucker for anything chess-themed so this was great! It did feel too easy once I got the "pawns get queen moves" bonus, but with some balancing and more variety I could see myself playing this for hours.

Wow this is a really cool concept! You managed to combine chess and roguelike mechanics in a very engaging way, with bite-sized levels and satisfying rewards. I can see this become really addictive.

The pixel art reminds me of 90s PC games and the gameplay feels smooth and intuitive. Music and sound effects are a nice touch too.

One of my favourite entries so far, good job :smile:

Really cool to see another chess-inspired game. I love your art style and the use of cards to summon the new pieces.

Fun game! Took me a while to understand why my pawns were OP :sweat_smile:. Thanks for participating!

A very fun game. It would be possible to spend hours playing, the game is so well made. The graphics are beautiful, the gameplay is very refined, the sound is minimal and good, in short, everything works wonderfully well in this game. Regarding the difficulty, I'm not a good chess person, but I feel like if I really played for hours, I wouldn't be defeated once. And in this case I must have played for almost 30 minutes hahaha. I'm not saying that this is a bad point, because I think that perhaps this was something planned (having an easy and accessible difficulty for everyone).

But well, excellent game!

That's really interesting puzzle idea! I've got "queen" power on my pawns in the begginning of the game and so I was too powerful :)
Thank you for your game!

This was a fantastic game! I wasn't sure what to expect going in cause I'm not good at chess-chess but this game had a fun amount of strategy and planning and the audio and visuals make for a calm and relaxing experience! I managed to get a high score of 8200 on the first run it was really fun. Great work!

A great twist on a classic game. Would have liked to see one or two more pieces available for me too use, but a great job in the time frame.

very cool take on chess! my pawns got way too overpowered by the end, but i had fun, good job!

This was a really cool game. The pawns got maybe a bit overpowered and would have been nice with some more pieces but it is really cool what was accomplished in the timeframe.

Really cool game, very innovative!

Kind of liked the game but at the same time it feels kind of empty. Killing all the enemy pieces isn't hard and thus you basically beat it at stage 5. After that pawns might move like queens which make continuation even easier. Made it to wave 25 tho and got tired because of necessity to put all the pieces manually. Would be great to have auto preparation

Really enjoyed this entry. Very impressive how much is built into this game including enemy AI. I love chess and had a blast upgrading my pawns to being unstoppable. I felt untouchable and made the mistake of leaving my king vulnerable, whoops. One of the most fun entries I've played during this jam.

The game's mechanics are so well thought out! that's the strength of this project! it lacks signs and feedback, but I've shared it with my friends because it's so good! incredible discovery! Well done to you!

That's really good! Nice one!

A unique idea with a solid execution! Graphically a bit plain, but the style was consistent. Not sure why the pawns suddenly gained superpowers, but I guess it was to make the game less tedious. Good work!

You need to add Stockfish here=) Sometimes it makes stupid moves.
Also, sometimes pawn had a lot of moves so it behave like a rock. Double/triple movements really confused me sometimes. I've fot a behaviour that the opponent's Queen moves out of the screen. It feels like a bug.

Besides that, amazing game!

Amazing game, love the idea of a expanding table , great sprites

Thank you for all the feedback and support! I've decided to keep working on this and have been busy at work on redoing this to avoid all the spaghetti from the jam :sweat_smile: If you have any additional feedback I would love to hear it! There was only two card types in the jam version (x gets y's moves, increase move length) so as many noticed, you got overpowered quickly! I think variety in cards is what is going to make this game particularly fun, so feel free to share any ideas you may have :smile:


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Thank you all for playing, rating, and commenting on the game! It's been very inspiring to see so much great feedback :smile: If you are interested in a full game of this please reply back and I will try and inform you as the game progresses!
@floweryandy @merb1000 @camden-obertop @falk-hoeppner @braktheman @synthol @lucavazz @whalejam @roburab @scurvystevon @aaron-hart @vivid-hallucination @patrick-pang @dreamscale @nazorus @matt-ravenhall @parker8283 @vphyre @meranolean @sodagummy @air-dinghy @custodi @oggeloppe @jojopalambas @lima-victor @shredmer @abominablescience @shaneshanekavanagh @justmars @roman-dubrovin @josang1567

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Specific feedback/comments:

@lucavazz - I didn't really implement a lot of the chess rules because its definitely non standard. I'll consider that for the future release!

@roburab - I hadn't considered how upgrading your pawn effectively means you lose any pawn specific effects :thinking: Might be worth allowing the player to decide if they want to upgrade!

@vphyre - That's a good point, I think I may add an easy mode in the final version!

@air-dinghy - Were you referencing having more cards? or different non-chess pieces with different moves?

@lima-victor - Unfortunately there is only so much you can do in a jam :sweat_smile: Definitely plan to make it more compelling for a full version!

@justmars - Unfortunately I only had time for two different effect card types, so you got overpowered quickly :sweat_smile:

@roman-dubrovin - Stockfish would be interesting but unfortunately it only works on standard chess boards. Given the timeframe I didn't want to go down a rabbit hole and not be able to complete the initial idea :sweat_smile: If you have any feedback for AI improvements (dumb moves you mentioned) I would love to hear more so I can improve it for the full version! I haven't seen the bug where the opponent's queen went off the board, if you are able to reproduce it (or remember how) I would love to try and track that bug down!

@frozenfire92 Sign me up for any updates you make to the game!

@frozenfire92 Me too! Eager to play extended version

An excellent idea, and well executed! Definitely needs some balancing, as the upgrades make everything a bit too easy. I'm a decent chess player and easily reached wave 30 without using any upgrades or piece fusions, by just luring enemy pieces into my pawns, and using the king to finish them. Only the queens were a bit problematic.

Some suggestions:
- please fix the black/white alternation when the board size increases ^^;
- allow to place pieces on the back ranks instead of just the first two
- include more pieces from chess variants such as the Janus, Camel, etc.

Good job using Godot and making a web version that simply worked on my Android phone!

When you reached a big board then the right corner of the board became out of the screen. Sometimes AI moves pieces to this corner and I don't see them on the screen.
In regards to blunders, I see that blacks always have an advantage in terms of material, it means that to them it is profitable to exchange equal pieces.
1. Don't move a piece to the cell that is under attack
2. Exchange pieces if they have equal costs
3. Don't exchange pieces for the lower piece.
If you can implement these rules it will be much more challenging and interesting)
I think you can sell it to chess.com as a minigame some day=)
Good luck with your game!


Here you can see in the corner part of the board is out of the screen.
Also, Now when I played I get that improvements of pawns are redundant part of the game. It would be much interesting if after any round you just get more pieces and then pure chess works

@roman-dubrovin Thank you for following up, I appreciate it!

For the jam I didn't have time to properly deal with camera zooming and not mangling the pixel art :sweat_smile: There is basic camera movement with the arrow keys to help facilitate this (space to reset). For the full game I plan to have both a zoom feature and camera movement for situations like this! (I think I will also work on the algorithm to center the camera better on the board)

Admittedly the AI is quite simplistic and works like so:

- if there is a move to kill the king, take it
- if there is a move to kill a piece, pick one at random
- else pick a random available move

There is a lot to improve there, particularly in the last two points. I suspect I'll need to study some more chess and chess engines to have something a bit more engaging :smiley:

> Now when I played I get that improvements of pawns are redundant part of the game

Unfortunately with only two effect cards that's definitely the case. I think with the full game I want to aim for at least 30 different effects and potentially more rarity with them.

Thanks so much for the feedback, if you have more its always welcome!

@samh Thank you so much for playing and sharing some feedback!

Unfortunately with the jam there was only so much time so I only got two different effect cards in (x gets y’s moves, increase move length) so you definitely got overpowered quickly and made it too easy. I aim to have at least 30 effects in the full game and tweak the rarities to prevent that. If you have any ideas for effect cards I'd be happy to hear them :smiley:

> please fix the black/white alternation when the board size increases

This was something I was on the fence about. I wanted to follow chess board rules where white's left corner is always black. Unfortunately that means you see the same colors connect on board size increase


For the full game I'm planning on having non square shapes so this may not be as big of a problem (but I believe the algorithm I have now would still produce this effect where they connect if the overall width has increased :thinking: ). Definitely will consider how to make this feel a bit more fluid, great feedback!

> allow to place pieces on the back ranks instead of just the first two

The plan was for further waves with bigger boards you can have increasing distance (ex 3, 4, 5), I wasn't able to implement this in the jam due to time constraints

> include more pieces from chess variants such as the Janus, Camel, etc.

I didn't know about these but will definitely take a look!

> web version that simply worked on my Android phone!

I was quite surprised by this as well!

Thanks again for playing and leaving detailed feedback, it's always appreciated :smiley: If you are interested in further updates to the game (I'm working on this for a full release) let me know and I'll be sure to tag you!

I played this after reading the post-mortem explaining how to play, which made it very easy to pick up. The star(s) made more sense after I obtained and clicked it to see what it did. Excellent job.

Wow, while the amount of upgrades is, indeed, low, the game still feels pretty polished otherwise!

Some things that came to mind while I was playing include showing available enemy moves (by marking those cells red on player's turn), making the board one row longer or shorter right before size increases to avoid doubling of color, and automatically finishing the round if all enemies are killed.

At the same time, considering time constraints, playing feels pretty good, and I'd definitely play more if/when you do a post-jam version. Good job!


@nbumgardner thanks for reading (and then playing)!

@dragonayzer unfortunately that was a core idea that we ran out of time for more effects. Hoping to have at least 30 effects in the full version (working on making this a full game)! I really like your suggestions and will look at them for the full version :smiley:

Hey this is such a cool idea! A could see this game turning into a phone game and me playing it often! I'm not a great chess player, but I managed to survive several waves! The graphics are really nice and the musics suits the mood of the game very well too! Great job! Have a great jam!

Fun game! The balance didn't feel quite right - getting 2 pawns + 1 red dot every turn is extremely busted as I had a bajillion queen+knight pawns that could move 3 times per turn really fast, but I think the concepts are fun and the balance can be solved with some tweaks. Take a look at shotgun king on steam if you haven't already, there's some overlap there. Good work!

@matt-ravenhall @lima-victor Just wanted to follow up! I did keep working on the game, and while it shifted more towards classic chess than this version, it was comments like yours that inspired me to keep going. I'm releasing it January 13, 2026 on steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/4100740/Waves_of_Chess/