Chess 2: A Retrospective

Upon playing the game in its completed form, and receiving feedback from other people who have played the game, I would like to write up a full retrospective review on our finished product:

One significant criticism we received was that it feels terrible to attack, be blocked, and essentially lose your turn to a dice roll. in response to this, we thought up a few solutions. One was to give the pieces health instead of defense, which could deplete over multiple attacks, whereas another idea was to reduce a piece's defense rolls by 1 for each time they successfully defend against an attack. Personally, I prefer the latter option. This is primarily because adding health into the mix of things that have to be tracked would not only make things a lot harder to track, but would generally make the game much more grindy and long, as taking a piece in one move would often be uncommon or impossible. Alternatively, while I find that the defense reduction mechanic may be hard to track, I feel that it would be a far more fun and fair way to respond to queries about lost turns and lack of impact of missed attacks.

Another significant criticism of Chess 2 was that the number of pieces made the game, overall, far too hard to keep track of, making it difficult to strategize and make intelligent plays. aside from this being a skill issue, we could solve this by creating a smaller alternative gamemode, played on a 6 by 8 board, in which each player controls 2 knights, 2 pikemen, a king and a queen, along with 6 pawns. This simplified board state creates quicker and simpler games that are easier to understand.

Finally, we received the criticism that some of the game's cards were not dynamic or unique enough. This could be solved simply by making less cards that simply boost attack or defense, and more that change the way the game is played, or affect the game state in a more complex way. cards like these include Gate to the Grave, which stays face up on the field, and allows both players to revive an identical piece after 3 pieces have been destroyed, Fall of Rome, which destroys a piece after it has successfully defended against 3 attacks, and Hidden Thief, which forces the opponent to discard a card after their third draw after the card is activated. Creating more of these cards would be somewhat time-consuming, however it would add to the chaos and complex strategy of the game.

In my personal opinion, I think the game is close to perfect, in that it almost perfectly represents my vision of the spirit of the game. Therefore, my thoughts on some of the changes proposed may seem, or indeed be, laced with proverbial thorns, due to their potential misunderstanding of what I feel the game is meant to be.

For example, though the defense reduction mechanic could increase the ability of players to destroy highly fortified pieces, and prevent wasted turns, I believe that this would devalue legendary cards like Fall of Rome, steals the gimmick of cards like Glass Shield, as well as being hard to track on a physical board. 

I can, however, agree that more complex and unique cards would be a brilliant addition to the game, as they would add to the spirit of Chaos and Complexity that characterize the game. Cards that simply equip to a piece and boost their stats are often very boring to use, even compared to cards like Frenzied Rage, which boosts attack with a dice, and comes with the drawback of forcing a piece to attack if able, which can essentially stun-lock you, or force you to move your pieces into bad situations.

However, I utterly detest the suggestion of a Miniature version of the game, as I feel it destroys takes the chaos and complexity of the game. Strong emotive language aside, I do feel that this suggestion completely misses the spirit of the game, as the point of the chess 2 is to make the game of chess feel almost comically random, chaotic and complex, but in a way that encourages strategy, and still feels fair and fun for both players.

I'd like to conclude this retrospective by clarifying that much of what I have written is purely my opinion, and my choices regarding changes to the game based on feedback are based primarily on my own vision for the game, which primarily takes after yugioh, as may have been noticeable in the style in which I wrote the text on many cards (using colons and semicolons to indicate conditions and costs, as well as using words like target, equip and field), and may reflect the flaws of said game.