Chess 2: The Sequel - 20/20 hours

The final 10 hours were an ordeal, even if I did spend a combined 2-3 hours periodically checking the multiplayer to see if there was anyone online looking for a game (there weren't). I won almost every game I played. Dozens of them, all in a row, only occasionally getting fatigued and distracted enough for the AI to squeak out a midline invasion. It wasn't boring so much as pointless. It was a solved problem. The AI was never going to give me a challenge (the occasional lazy oversight notwithstanding). In fact, I grew to suspect that it chose its moves almost entirely at random. I also couldn't choose which armies I fought against, so comparing various match-ups was haphazard at best.

I guess I'm a little resentful of the fact that Chess 2 was not the game I thought it was going to be. I was hoping that it would be a toybox of variants, where I would have a myriad of options to customize my chess experience. Instead, it was a singular vision of chess that gave me one axis of freedom (with the army selection), but was otherwise less customizable than even the chess games I played back in the 90s.

It's probably unreasonable of me to project my hopes onto this game, just because of a half-remembered reading of its Steam pitch. It is what it is, and if I'm imagining another game in its place, I might as well wish it was Civiization V for all that my desires are relevant. However, seeing as how Chess 2: The Sequel feels like it was hastily put together and incomplete, wishing for more doesn't feel as ungrateful as it might otherwise.

I'll wrap up this post with my thoughts on the six armies before I put this behind me forever and go back to traditional chess.

The classic army was, surprisingly, one of the strongest. You wouldn't think a single piece could be that much of an influence on the game's strategy, but the queen is so powerful that it outweighs the other armies' gimmicks.

The nemesis army allows you to move pawns sideways if doing so brings them closer to the king and replaces the queen with the nemesis, a piece that moves like a traditional queen, but can only capture and be captured by the king. I got the feeling that it was very technical, but since the pawns don't get a double move and the queen was mainly useful as a defensive piece (blocking enemy movement and shutting down a whole row for the enemy's mainline invasion) I found it slow and unwieldy, and playing against an AI nemesis was just a slog.

The empowered army gives your rooks, knights, and bishops the ability to move like each other, provided they are in adjacent squares. This was probably my favorite army, because it allowed me to get my big pieces out fast and pursue a really aggressive strategy. It also allowed for some clever combination moves that were entirely wasted on the computer.

The last three armies, I never saw the AI play, probably because they were so different it couldn't handle them. 

The two kings army gives you two kings and gives the kings an extra move and special "whirlwind attack" that can capture all adjacent pieces (friend or foe). Twice the kings means twice the vulnerability to checkmates, so I always tried to wrap it up fast and rush towards the midline invasion. It turned out to be pretty powerful, but playing it was an ordeal. It always felt like I was constantly under fire, thanks to my double weakness.

The reaper army was the most gimmicky of the six. Your queen was replaced a "reaper" which could move to any square on the board and capture any piece that wasn't on the back row, and your rooks were replaced by "ghosts" which could teleport anywhere on the board, but which could neither capture nor be captured. This army proved to be the worst defensively, and every time I used it, I wound up just clearing out all the enemy's pieces because the AI could not understand protecting or threatening. I imagine it would be tedious to play against in multiplayer, though. Any gap in your defense could be instantly pounced upon.

Finally, the animal army, the one most different from standard chess. I'm not going to list every difference, because there are lots. The bishop, knight, rook, and queen are all changed to move differently than their standard counterparts. I was surprised how quickly I got used to it, though. It was probably the army most deserving of being called "chess 2," exotic enough that it refreshed the game, but polished enough that its alternate movement modes worked together. A game that was nothing but animal vs animal could work on its own, which is more than you can say for any army but the classic.

Overall, Chess 2: The Sequel was a noble experiment. If you want a more chaotic, less skill-heavy version of chess that can be won or lost in 5-10 minutes, you could probably do worse, but I wouldn't recommend buying the video game version unless you're coordinating with a friend to try multiplayer at exactly the same time. There was nothing in the video game version that you couldn't do better by downloading the rules (available here for free from the company's website) and playing face to face.