Features

Five distinct difficulty levels

Chess Mess difficulty menu

Easy:

52 pieces
Hints Allowed
Turns disabled
Valid Move Highlighting Enabled
King DOES NOT Move After Player Captures

Medium:

48 pieces
Hints Allowed
Turns Disabled
Valid Move Highlighting Enabled
King DOES NOT Move After Player Captures

Hard:

38 pieces
Hints Allowed
Turns Enabled
Valid Move Highlighting Enabled
King Moves After Player Captures
King Does Not Telegraph Next Move
Pawn Promotion to Opposite Color Pawn

Impossible:

32 pieces
Hints Allowed
Turns Enabled
Valid Move Highlighting Disabled
King Moves After Player Captures
King Does Not Telegraph Next Move
Pawn Promotion to Opposite Color Pawn

Seeds

Chess Mess supports Seeded board generation so you can share specific boards and compare scores!

Feel free to share you favorite seed with the tagChess Mess Seed. So far, one of the hardest seeds I've found is Hard b4bc1797. It's quite limited in terms of material and it has a fairly high King In score on Hard!

Chess Mess seed b4bc1797

Themes

There are multiple themes included with Chess Mess including four distinct color schemes and chess sets! My personal go-to is the Chess Mess 2000 that's loosely based on one of my favorite games as a kid.

Chess Mess 2000 theme

Cards

The card system in Chess Mess is incredibly powerful and each card can introduce stackable buffs, nerfs, and power-ups. They can effect one piece, the board, and even the rules themselves!

My favorite card so far is "Useful Acolyte" which allows bishops to move through allied pieces. Super powerful and it can come in handy!

Soundtrack (WIP)

Currently, only two songs exist in the game but more are on the way! As usual, my favorite band The Brothers Nylon, have provided the Theme Song and I actually supplied the other track myself.

Steam Deck support (WIP)

Until today, the game ran on Linux but only if you launched it outside of Steam. However, as of 4PM eastern 2024-10-07, the game is now working on Steam on all platforms including Linux, SteamOS, and Windows.

Currently, the game only supports mouse emulation with the left touchpad, but gamepad support is in the works.