Chess can either be a classical game and sport so well balanced it doesn’t need buffs or nerfs for centuries or a theme a majority of people understand that you can riff off to make your own fun like 5D Chess.
Chessplosion is of the latter. Created by solo developer CT Matthews, Chessplosion is a mix of Chess and… Bomberman.
Despite its meme-ish premise, the look and concept of Chessplosion seem well fleshed out.
All the chess pieces’ explosion radius matches how they move. Bishops explode on diagonal, rooks explode on straight rows and columns, queens combines both explosions, the knight explodes only on the ends of an L-shape move and the king is actually useful as it explodes like a normal bomb.
You don’t control the chess pieces like a chess game and you don’t even play proper chess. The 8×8 chessboard is more of a motif in Chessplosion. You control a character that carries chess-shaped bombs to destroy enemy chess pieces.
There’s an Adventure mode to go through with 90 stages and eight bosses to fight against. There are also 10 stages to survive through bullet hell by avoiding all the chess-inspired attack patterns in Survival mode. There’s even a Puzzle mode with 100 levels to solve using a limited set of chess-bombs.
No ballistic missiles, however. So don’t expect to pull a Tennison Gambit here.
And there’s also Battle mode, where you can fight enemy AI or friends in a Bomberman-like battle, but with chess themes. Battle mode supports up to 4 players local or online, with 12 arenas to choose from.
If Chessplosion feels too hard, there’s also Assist mode that gives you options to tweak the game difficulty, or outright skip some stages.
If Bomberman with a Chess theme sounds like your jam, Chessplosion is out now on PC via Steam and Itch.io.