Shotgun King

There are many chess variants like it but this one is mine

Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate is a chess variant video game that I agreed to play for this month’s Blaugustine Humble Bundle review.

Now that we’ve got rid of 95% of the potential readership with that promising opening paragraph, I’m pleased to report to the other 5% of you that we really are going to talk about a game best described as ‘chess but the king has a gun’. In Shotgun King, the player acts as a single piece that moves on the 8x8 board as a king, but instead of capturing fires an arc of shrapnel at nearby enemy pieces, seeking to clear a way towards and destroy his opposite number, a more conventional chess king. Early levels are relatively trivial, but winning a ‘throne’ requires defeating the enemy king a dozen times, with a choice of new powers for both yourself and the enemy army that change the nature of the battle and increase the level of challenge between each successive board in a way that will be very familiar to anyone who has played any rougelite title lately.

In the fine tradition of those who are lovers but not very good players of chess, I did a lot of exploration of Chess Variants in a past life, thus I have played the 1921 game Rifle Chess, in which pieces have guns and can capture each other without moving into their square and putting themselves in danger, and which makes for a decidedly un-chesslike experience. You can thus imagine my surprise to find that the creatively named Shotgun King actually requires a lot of chess-like thinking to succeed. Each type of enemy unit moves on a timer, allowing numerous enemy pieces to attack at once, potentially producing volatile situations where your king is under attack from multiple pieces, requiring forward planning to ensure that you’ll be able to escape the ensuing checks in the next move. It took me a significant number of attempts to win my first throne, and once I’d worked out a plan that worked I was able to win a second one immediately afterwards using a similar strategy.

I’m not sure that bodes particularly well for the longevity of this one in my game rotation, as I doubt the small differences between runs caused by the varying capabilities of the different weapons in the game or even the more significant differences caused by the random selection of ability cards encountered will give enough variety to encourage replayability, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find this funky little puzzle-ish number down here in one of the bottom two spots in the monthly bundle, an area that isn’t traditionally all that promising. This one’s not worth the bundle price on its own, with a current cost of $12 AUD and an lowest cost since release last year of just over $7, but in a bundle that includes some more heavyweight titles it’s a nice little bonus, and I reckon it’s well worth trying out if you have any interest in chess games that you don’t have to take very seriously.