Chess, Texas

Roughly programmed, AI usage, frustrating opponents. Good in theory, awful in practice.

Good premise, and not without charm, but lazy and badly designed/balanced (among other issues, a major one is that the Blank powerup is busted, basically guaranteeing an easy victory even on Impossible difficulty if used at the right time), with a strong AI slop smell.

I would love to be able to change this to a thumbs up, as this is the only RPG (loosely speaking) I'm aware of that uses my favorite turn based strategy game of all time as its battle system, but it's gonna take some hefty updates from the dev.

Even though there's some bugs and programming mistakes, i think it's a very fun game to anyone that loves chess

YES CHESS YES

This game makes chess fun. You play a variety of openings, puzzles, end-games, goofy positions, alternate board setups, and traditional games -- with a few extra tools to take the edge off the AI when it decides to play like Stockfish for 20 turns straight.

The game gives you limited, consumable items that you can use (totally optional) to see what the engine thinks is the best move; or to encourage the AI to blunder; or to just take back a bad move and try the turn again.

I'm not sure these mechanics completely solve the issue of how much your opponents' elos swing from the beginning of the game to the end... but its a fun and useful band-aid for it.

Some complaints: Opponents are way harder by the last 2/3rds of the game than they started at, and it feels like the elo progression is plainly unrealistic. Chess is a life-long game. No one is going to start at 700 and end at 1600 in the course of playing a title like Chess, Texas. But that's what it feels like the difficulty curve is asking of you.

And there are some bugs creeping around in here. In the non-standard board setups, I've seen the AI castle THROUGH its own pieces. And I just had the experience of playing a move, using a Hint, then taking a Mulligan... which froze my side of the board completely. I simply couldn't make another move after that and had to reset.

But the bugs are few and the unrealistic difficulty curve isn't unique to Chess, Texas. It's endemic throughout the sport of chess. So its hard to be angry at a solo dev who didn't manage to crack the code that Chess.com still hasn't come to understand. Which is this: 90% of the players of this game have a 3-digit elo. But you all keep making Chess activities aimed at the upper 10%. ignoring the majority of the player base. The high-elo players acting as the keepers of the sport of Chess have an irrational (and elitist) bias telling them that 1200 is the "middle." It's not. The middle is 600. That's a statistical fact. Start serving the broader audience and more players will stick around long enough to get better.

But I digress. Chess, Texas is the most fun I've had playing Chess... maybe ever. It's a challenge. It's an ego-boost. It's a good way to learn. And it's frequently funny in places you don't expect.

I give it my full recommendation, especially at this price. And I hope the developer makes more like it - improving on the formula and smoothing out the rougher edges - as they go.