Rogess: Role-Playing and Chess in One

One of the oldest games, and at the same time one of the most attractive. Chess fits perfectly into the "easy to learn, hard to master" category, and its traditional profile guarantees a certain continuity in the basic rules, but that doesn't stop us from enjoying some modifications. One of them is Rogess, which at first glance is another online chess, but hides several elements belonging to RPGs that will take you by surprise.

Chess is full of legends, grains of rice, grand masters who face off in epic battles, tools to improve our skill, and much more. But if we set aside its extreme popularity and the stability of its rules, the truth is that we have always flirted with the possibility of altering its mechanics.

The world of science fiction didn't hesitate to create variants like three-dimensional chess, Mr. Spock's favorite, but we also find things at the level of chessboxing, in which opponents exchange punches and moves.

For the vast majority of the public, chess is a strategy game deployed on a perfect battlefield with armies in equal conditions. However, there is a touch of role-playing within that combination. After all, when you play, you are the commander of one of the armies, which triumphs or dies depending on your skill and vision. Now, if we extend that same dose of RPG to the pieces and rules of chess, what do we get? Something like Rogess.

Rogess: A Hybrid of Role-Playing and Chess

The first thing Rogess, designed by Jonathan Lessard and Pippin Barr, is to deceive us. Why? Because its interface is that of a normal chess game. An 8 × 8 board, white, black, eight pawns on each side, nothing strange. With no additional data available, I started the game "thinking about chess", but when the moment came to attack a piece… I received a "MISS."

There is the RPG element! Each piece has a health level or HP: 10 points for the king, 9 for the queen, 5 for the rooks, 3 for knights and bishops, and 1 for pawns. And if you plan to take an enemy piece, you must attack multiple times until you leave it without HP. The king, queen, and rooks hit a little harder than normal, but the process is tied to a background RNG.

A fundamental detail is that the king can be left "exposed," since its final defeat is not positional: In Rogess, you must kill the king.

I only have two criticisms for the game: It needs more feedback and statistics, and its artificial intelligence plays quite badly. Fortunately, there is a two-player mode, and that's when everything changes.

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