Chesslike, Like, A Cool Idea.

I experienced the vitriol of a purist well before I knew the term. In second grade I attended a community Chess club event with a friend, and after he got bored and I felt bad, I suggested we re-arrange all the pieces on the board how we want, and play from there.

You would have thought I drew a picture of the prophet Mohammad. Within moments an adult guilt-tripped us out of it - we can do what we want, but whatever we were doing, certainly *wasn't* Chess, and certainly didn't have value. 

Well the joke is on that guy, because Chesslike: Adventures in Chess is a heck of a lot of fun, and a hell of a value for $1.99.

The premise is pretty simple - mash up the concept of a dungeon crawler with the movement and tactics of Chess. Collect items to change what piece you are, descend downward, open locked doors, avoid or capture enemies, and see how far you can go (and in how few moves).


Coded entirely in HTML5 (and actually available on the web, too) Chesslike avoids fluff and bombast and throws you into the action quickly. It also helpfully refreshes you on the various moves certain pieces can make, and also highlights titles on the board where you can move.

During my couple of hours with the game I ran into an occasional menu glitch and seemingly got stuck, but it turned out that I simply was in the middle of summoning a piece I had previously captured - which arguably could have been better explained.

Most importantly Chesslike reconnected me with the world's oldest and most popular turn based strategy game - and made it feel fresh. Spending five minutes jaunting through a dungeon is a far more accessible experience than loading up an entire game of chess on your phone, only to go up against expert players or genius-level CPU, and could hypothetically serve as a decent starting point for kids and friends who find chess intimidating.

Are you going to spend hours and hours and hours with your nose a half a foot away from your phone trying to reach the next level in this game? Probably not. But it's a great lingerer, worth pulling out during a  five minute break at work, while waiting for the bus, or if you want to bend your mind around backwards a bit (the user created levels are killer).

It's funny, when I think back to the chess club I remember wanting to to take those 'chess challenges' I saw in the newspaper as a kid, the ones that shared real-estate with my precious funny pages, and say "What about these! Don't these have value?!". Now, if he isn't dead and I end up seeing him again, I'll show him this game, the people playing, and its creativity, and simply utter "Check".