Battle Chess

In 1988, Interplay made a game called Battle Chess. It released on thousands of different types of computers and was all about being able to watch your chess pieces walk on over to their places on the board and beat each other to death. Good stuff.

In 1990, it was ported to the NES, and while the DOS version you can play here has some nice, shiny armour and a wonderfully unpleasant creaking sound as each piece moves, the NES version has these wonderfully expressive, slightly cuter sprites that are full of character.

Each piece walks slowly across the board when you select a move, and when a piece takes another, we fade to a battle screen and watch the kill. It's on this screen that I learned the king uses a gun. He just blasts any enemy he comes across with it. Nice.

An exemplary piece of design is the rook, which splits itself into two weird, blocky legs in order to stomp itself into position. That's no tower, that's a creature! And I love that thing very much.

Because each piece has to walk over to its new position every turn, the experience of playing chess this way is very slow. Your move can't be quick, because the people you're using as pieces have to slowly make their way to their square. It feels quickly agonising, but then, I have never been a thoughtful chess player. Perhaps the lengthy animation offers the perfect moment for reflection.

Or perhaps not.