A Strange Twist On Chess Makes For An Excellent Roguelike Strategy Game In Shotgun King
Chess has never been so dangerous.
There’s only so much you can do improve on chess, but you can at least make it a whole lot weirder. That simple fact led to the great Really Bad Chess in 2016, and now, a more recent spin on one of the most-played games in the world is available for free for a short time on the Epic Games Store for mobile. This time, it’s an even bigger deviation from its origins, turning chess into a turn-based roguelike strategy game that’s just as bizarre as it is captivating.
Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate is the work of Punkcake Délicieux, a three-person development team with a huge and varied back catalog supported by monthly subscriptions. Earlier this year, the team distributed Nama Takashi’s fantastic puzzle game Öoo, but it’s Shotgun King that became the developer’s first big hit back in 2022.
Shotgun King is a surprisingly clever strategy game that’s also a silly twist on chess.
In Shotgun King, you play as a mad tyrant fighting to put down a rebellion in his dominion — the chess board. With his own subjects, in the form of other chess pieces, all turning against him, the king takes up a shotgun to take down his would-be usurpers alone. It’s a knowingly silly premise that has a lot of fun with the medieval trappings of chess, while brilliantly blending the rules of chess with a roguelike structure that makes each run unique.
Every game of Shotgun King begins with your megalomaniacal monarch at one end of the board and an assortment of opposing pieces at the other. Each piece moves like they do in a standard game of chess — bishops move diagonally, rooks move in straight lines, and the fearsome queen can move in any direction. As the king, you can move to any adjacent space, but not if doing so would put you in check. Unlike your typical game of chess, though, you also have a shotgun on your side.
The goal of every stage is to destroy the enemy’s king. Rather than capturing pieces by moving into them, your shotgun is your only way of clearing the board. At any time on your turn, you can take aim, launching an attack across the board at your opponent’s pieces. You can aim freely, which is unusual for a turn-based game, and your attack’s accuracy is determined by the shotgun’s spread, rather than a mathematical chance of success. That means you can take advantage of pieces that are clumped together to hit them all in one shot, or launch attacks at a distance and hope you get lucky with a long-shot hit. But you can only prepare one attack at a time and reloading requires you to move, forcing you to stay on your toes the entire time.
Every round you win adds new rules to keep the game fresh.
Just adding a long-range weapon on top of chess’ standard rules already makes Shotgun King a surprisingly fun strategy game. What makes it so replayable is the addition of modifiers at the end of each round. Whenever you clear a board, you choose from two sets of modifiers, which give both you and your enemies a bonus. You might upgrade your shotgun’s abilities, give your king new powers, or even add optional objectives to the board that grant you even more bonuses. But at the same time, you’ll be making the enemy stronger by giving them additional queens, buffing their health, or even granting new powers like healing and ranged attacks to their pieces.
On its face, Shotgun King seems mostly like a joke, and to be clear, it’s a very goofy game. But underneath its absurd premise, Shotgun King is an extremely compelling strategy game that works a little differently every time you play it. Its mix of turn-based rules with free-aiming attacks feels utterly unique despite its extremely old-school inspirations, making it a perfect mobile game for bite-sized strategy.
