Chess 2: The Sequel (C2TS) has the core rules and mechanics of chess pretty much intact, but the tactics are significantly changed thanks to the addition of five new armies and their unique abilities. These abilities open up a tremendous amount of depth to an already incredibly deep game and allow players to discover all kinds of ways to achieve midline invasion (whereby your king crosses the midline) or checkmate (where you “corner” the enemy king). For chess amateurs like me, having a sort of ‘fresh start,’ you know, even though it isn’t a completely new beginning, is rather exciting. For seasoned players, they made find these changes unnecessary or disagreeable, but I suspect many will find them refreshing.
So, the classic chess army with the King, Queen, Bishop, Rooks, and so forth, is still here, and their classic behaviors and appearance are preserved, too. The classic army is always available to you or your opponent, be they a local player for “Couch” mode, the Computer (aka Practice Dummy), or an online opponent. Equally as available are the five new armies known as: Empowered, Two Kings, Reaper, Animals, and Nemesis. Each has their own custom coat of arms and pieces to go along with their abilities that you will need to watch the tutorial to discover, but note that the pieces, while looking different and sometimes having different names, still follow the “format” of the classic army, in terms of alignment and quantity. That said, the tutorial can be viewed from the main menu, and while its succinct and very helpful, I would have appreciated a little more depth to it as far as the basic chess rules go, and it would have been really nice if there were a way to pop-up a reminder of the abilities for each army during a game. I understand that could slow games down, but, for online play, each player has about twenty-five minutes total time anyway. In other words, when the game starts, so does a timer for the player who is in turn. That timer continues to countdown from just over twenty-five minutes until a move is made, at which point it stops, only to resume again at the next turn. You can see your opponents time on screen, and indeed you could take twenty minutes on your first decision and then spend a few seconds on the rest of them if you so desired.
I’ll get back to more multiplayer thoughts soon, but to get back on topic, lets take a closer look at these new armies. Empowered is all about team mobility. I would consider it the most complicated of the new armies because you really have to know how to move. Within the Empowered army, whenever one of your pieces is adjacent to an empowered knight, bishop, or rook, it’s able to move with the rules of that neighboring piece, although the Queen can only move like a King piece. I spent the least amount of time with Empowered, but Two Kings proved to be a lot more enjoyable for me. With Two Kings, this army literally has two kings, known as Warrior Kings, who are able to move and execute a Whirlwind attack, which destroys neighboring pieces, both enemy and friendly. With this army, you get an optional second turn with each turn, but that second turn can only be used with one of the two Kings. You can be checkmated twice as easily, and to win by midline invasion, both of your kings have to make it across, but the offensive ability of the kings is often worth it. Against the CPU, I actually won a few times in a row with just a dozen or so turns, but that wasn’t always the case, and certainly wasn’t online, where the competition, while a bit scarce in the testing I did, was good.
The Reaper army is fun to use in that there are Reaper and Ghost pieces that can travel all over the board, but the Reaper cannot check the King. I actually forgot this and found myself surrounding the enemy King, unable to finish the match because of this caveat. The Ghost piece can neither capture or be captured, too. The Animals army is somewhat the opposite, sacrificing some mobility for added attack abilities, such as the Rampage of an elephant or the quick strike capture of the Tiger. Finally, the Nemesis, whom I faced a few times online, have some special pieces that are focused on eliminating the enemy King. The Nemesis piece itself moves like a Queen, yet can only be captured by the enemy King, for example.
Regardless of the army you choose, Duels and possibly Draws are inevitable. Duels are the optional prelude before a piece is captured. Whenever one piece attempts to move to an occupied space of an enemy piece, the defender can either accept the outcome or challenge the offender to a Duel. In either case, the defender piece goes away, but, it might be able to take the offender piece with it. Each player begins the match with three stones, and you can only hold a maximum of six. When a Duel happens, you can ‘bid’ zero stones (called a Bluff), or one, or two stones. It also costs one stone as a defender to even have the right to Duel. Whoever bids the most wins, but again, the defender piece is going away anyway. If you call someone’s bluff, you can either destroy one of their stones, or keep it. A Duel is a turn-event, meaning when online, players can “think it over” as long as they have time on the clock to do so. Fortunately, in the online matches I played, the pacing of the turns was tolerable if not good; sometimes you get a player who is either really good and is thinking several steps ahead or someone who maybe doesn’t know what they’re doing and that’s the reason they’re taking a while. On that note, one advantage of playing the CPU is that their decisions take a max of three seconds.
C2TS has an appropriately simplistic and traditional presentation, although I wouldn’t mind in a future update if the boards and the background get at least an optional skin or two to jazz up the visuals. Classical music, played solely from a piano, greets you from the start and subtly adds to the atmosphere. The menu system is straight-forward, with placeholders for Challenges and Correspondence. I presume Ludeme may issue weekly or bi-weekly challenge boards for players to take on, whereby they are put into the middle of a game with two warring armies and must win, but I’m not sure. The Correspondence section is under the game modes, so, perhaps this mode is an intentionally slow-paced multiplayer mode where players have a lot of time to make their moves? I confess I am unsure of the intention of this upcoming mode as well. Although, speaking of online multiplayer, it’s interesting to note that players start with 240 gold coins, and to play, you must spend eight of these. I didn’t pay close enough attention to see if when you win you get eight or more coins back, but I do know when you lose the game, you lose those eight coins. You can buy more directly from the Ouya Shop.
I didn’t expect to become proficient at chess just from playing this game for a few days, and, no surprise, that much has held true. On the other hand, I have been pleasantly surprised to find a renewed interest in the game of kings thanks to the new gameplay elements that C2TS brings to the table.