You’ll Summon. Upgrade. Conquer. With new wizards, new skills, new bosses, and more. This doesn’t sound much like chess.
But Misfits Attic is launching the chess-like roguelite game, Below the Crown, today on Steam. It’s a new take on chess and a love letter to the 1,500-year-old game, roguelikes and dungeon crawlers.
“It’s our love letter to all things nerdy,” said Tim Keenan, founder of Misfits Attic, which made indie hits like Duskers and A Virus Named TOM in the past. “It’s chess meets roguelike meets dungeon crawler meets everything I could think of.”
Keenan showed me the game at the recent Dice Summit and now the title is launching into version 1.0.
Following the success and acclaim of his 20+ award-winning strategy game, Duskers, Keenan has created an experience that balances all the fan-favorite elements of the timeless classic with a fun, accessible, and magical twist.
As a player, you don the robes of a “badass wizard” to lead a party of magically imbued, chess-inspired pieces through glitchy, ‘80s-inspired dungeons. Pull off thoughtful maneuvers to capture enemy parties with superior strategy (and perhaps a spell card or two), then share victories with fellow Wizards on the global leaderboards.
Keenan said that you move from room to room like a dungeon crawler, but each room is a type of chess board, with comlete with enemy pieces. You walk in as a sole wizard and cast pieces on the board where you can “see.” You add single-use spells and permanent skills into the mix, as well as upgrading your pieces. The rooms are procedurally generated, and, as you go deeper in to the dungeon, your perils grow, as do your rewards.
It’s like if someone infused the elegant tactics of chess, as a combat engine, into a dungeon crawler, he said.
The game won an Honorable Mention for Excellence in Design at the Independent Games Festival in March. It conjures sharp strategies and powerful spells for its PC release today. You can build out each Wizard’s repertoire with additional runes, upgrades, spells, skills, and final boss debuting in 1.0.
You can please the enigmatic Emperor by casting spells and making strategic moves to capture enemy pieces. Before leaving the dungeons, answer mysterious psychological evaluations to uncover this realm’s dark secrets.
Keenan chose this eclectic mix of things because “I’m and indie and I can just make what the hell I want. But the problem is it would be very nice to bring my audience with me from the last game. We have a cult following from Duskers.”
That was a command line interface game about “everybody being dead.” This game has another kind of retro aesthetic.
“I’ve always loved chess. It’s the most elegant game, and I always felt that not enough people would give it a chance becaues it has 16 pieces and hard to learn.”
The game started out as a mashup of chess and Magic: The Gathering. He called it Chess: The Gathering, and it was a prototype. But he wound up making Duskers instead. Then he came back to it, and he fell in love with the roguelike opportunity.
“As a developer, you get to play it and feel like you’re the player, instead of knowing the levels and stuff like that. So I fell in love with that, and then I decided to integrate that into the structure,” Keenan said. “You pick your wizard, which is basically, the king or bishop or knight. And then eventually they get weirder. You go into the dungeon. It has hazards. And you might have a piece that you named from before that has upgrades on it. This is an archer queen. She’s basically like a queen, but you have to attack range.”
You can cast a bishop into the board and then attack the archer queen. You can pick up an “undo” token and then use it in case the move turns out to be a really bad one. If you win, you can pick up bonuses like spells for things like teleporting your wizard.
Taking a step back, Keenan said, “One of the things that happened to me when I was studying chess is I was reading a book. It talked about, what if, instead of just playing the game like you normally do, I can move my rook here so it attacks your piece? What if I can I manipulate the pieces so that I can get a rook in that position?”
He said you can teleport your piece to safety, and Keenan said the game gets more fun when you start doing upgrades. You can put a piece dubbed the “Dark Square” on the table and this piece can’t be beaten. So that’s changes the game a lot.
You collect all of your cool abilities that give you more than chess capabilities, but you have to go up against bosses who can fight back. There’s a queen who disappears if she’s not attacking someone. Keenan calls her the “Mad Queen.”
“I’m trying to make chess more accessible for more people. And also bring something new, right?” he said.
Players have rated the game in the 90s as positive so far. But Keenan faces the classic indie challenge, where getting more eyeballs on the game is key.
The team has just 10 people, with just a few working full time. They’re based around the world in places like Canada, Mexico, Germany and Venezuela.
“We’ve got this team that’s just been affected by everything that’s kind of going on in the world, but we still are able to make this really cool game and pour our energy into this,” Keenan said.