Chesarama analysis. The pieces have left the board.

Minimol Games returns to chess by reinventing the story of the world’s oldest battle.

When you ask people if they know how to play chess and they say yes, 90% are lying. Placing the pieces and knowing how each one moves is like knowing which buttons you need to press in Souls: you’re going to die and you won’t know why until it’s too late. Chessarama will explain to you what you can do with these movements: stand up, score a goal and even survive a dragon’s fire breath. Break the 8×8 grid. With Chessarama, Minimol games He is developing his umpteenth chess game and he still has ideas left.

Chess is all about imagination. (GM D. Bronstein)

Chessarama is an acronym between Chess and Diorama. These are small scenarios in which the puzzles that we must solve are formed. There is 4 themes in campaign mode which unlock as we gain experience by completing the puzzles. Start with the farm, where you control the horse (as it could not be otherwise), and after a few initial simple puzzles, it introduces a mechanic that complicates everything exponentially. Having already faced all the puzzles that this mode offers, they seem to me to be the most complicated of all. Fortunately, the next campaign will unlock soon, and that’s a relief.

In the world of soccer street, we manage the tricks, the fools and the horses to score a goal for the king. It’s a much gentler challenge but also stimulating, especially because of the missions they offer you to obtain more experience points.

The last two levels are the most interesting, perhaps because of the difficulty in reaching them. We first embody a Queen Ronin, who must defeat Shogun and his army alone. It has very clever blocking mechanisms with which iterations to improve are pleasant.

Eventually we arrive in a fantasy land where a dragon is terrifying the entire town and it is the job of the seemingly weakest being to defeat it. This is a well-deserved last biome. Manage a Pawn square by square without the dreaded monster burning it.

In each diorama, the difficulty increases as new mechanics are introduced. Each biome is made up of 25 media enigmas with their respective trophies marked for special missions.

Farming until you reach the Dragon.

It’s natural in this type of game that you have to overcome a series of successes to advance. As in most games, get a certain number of stars to unlock the next phase. In Chessarama, this happens with experience points. As I said, the second world is unlocked easily, almost effortlessly. This way, if you find a stumbling block in a puzzle, you can move on to a completely different stone and the game won’t suffer.

From there, two other game modes are unlocked: battles against artificial intelligence based on the different campaigns and pure online chess multiplayer. Both challenging, but closer to basic chess games.

If you want more challenge in campaign mode, you have to work really hard and have an experience where just getting the puzzle right serves no purpose. The scoring system is very unbalanced and requires you to perfect most puzzles. Playing and replaying the same levels (especially the first ones on the farm) seems to me to be a point that, although it is a widely used resource in games of this type, can discourage many halfway through. This seems too demanding and above all a tedious challenge. Even with everything, as in the soulsthe level of satisfaction at the end of the challenge is great.

Conclusions

Whether it’s games of chess or puzzle games, we can have our phones full. But the set we are analyzing today gives very good results. We learn to think about chess without having to play it against an opponent or a machine, in my case always superior. It is easy to internalize the movements (known to everyone, but thought of by few) and even to be able to advance in games.

As a puzzle video game, it lives up to expectations and is engaging. I have used remote gaming several times without being able to play directly on the console and this service is made for these games. And that’s why I would enjoy this game more on a laptop or even a mobile phone to complete a puzzle in a short time.

I also comment on this for the technical section. It’s not a game that requires a lot of graphics power and it actually doesn’t have it. But the design looks neat. As an introduction to chess thinking, this also strikes me as exceptional. Removing pieces from the board refreshes concepts and allows the grid to draw differently in your head. Highly recommended for (guided) children and teenagers who want to learn.