Wizard of Yendor to mate in three (@xKN)

August 2, 2005 4:43 AM

ChessRogue = Chess + Rogue. (Open source, versions available for Linux and Windows.)

This console-based game takes the pieces of chess and puts them into a Roguelike environment. You start out with a weakened King who can only move and capture horizontally and vertically, in a randomized board full of multi-directional Pawns. As you capture more pieces, the king slowly gains additional powers, like diagonal capture and movement, Knight jumping, and eventually even Rook movement, among others. The opposition gets tougher too, until eventually the entire selection of pieces is out to get you.
Originally created for a three-day programming challenge on rec.games.roguelike.development, it's surprisingly cool, and works rather better than you might expect. It's useful as a break between Nethack fatalities.
posted by JHarris (19 comments total)

Hmm... on further reflection, maybe this is just a little bit outside the standard MeFi user's sphere of interest. Ah well, live and learn.
posted by JHarris at 5:25 AM on August 2, 2005

I thought it was interesting. But I lost the game. I also lost The Game.
posted by grouse at 5:31 AM on August 2, 2005

The Game?
posted by JHarris at 5:34 AM on August 2, 2005

I just lost The Game too!
posted by psychotic_venom at 5:53 AM on August 2, 2005

This seems nifty. Unfortunately it needs an odd compiler to build the game, and the odd compiler does not itself build successfully. Nice concept, though.
posted by majick at 6:11 AM on August 2, 2005

It was the techy aspects that dismayed me, too. Anyone want to make a version of this in Flash or Java that I can just play in my browser with no tricky stuff? I'd gladly give it a shot then.
posted by Faint of Butt at 6:21 AM on August 2, 2005

Balls to the standard MeFi user's sphere of interest. Post what you like, variety is good.

majick: The first link has binaries for both windows and linux.
posted by squidlarkin at 6:21 AM on August 2, 2005

Thanks for posting this. Love Nethack (even though I've never ascended) and its nice to see an interesting variation on the rogue formula.

I'm too lazy to do the research right now but I wonder if anyone's written a program to do RTS variant of chess?
posted by pandaharma at 6:22 AM on August 2, 2005

Sucks that there's no OS X port. (I stopped trying to compile it when I saw the long list of dependencies not just for the game itself, but for Kaya itself ...)

Other interesting roguelikes to hit the scene recently:

• DoomRL, the Doom roguelike
• Guild, an Angband-ish roguelike in which you play not an individual character, but an entire group
• POWDER, a roguelike for the Gameboy Advance (I've been wanting to try this out for a while)
• Hex Rogue - rogue on a hexagonal grid (warning: java app)

posted by aparrish at 6:29 AM on August 2, 2005

There goes my week! Thanks JHarris and aparrish!
posted by Joey Michaels at 7:43 AM on August 2, 2005

Thanks grouse and p_v -- I didn't even know what The Game was and now I've lost it.
posted by The Bellman at 8:11 AM on August 2, 2005

I'm a huge fan of the roguelikes. Neat idea, but it's no ADOM. But, then again, what is?
posted by absalom at 8:58 AM on August 2, 2005

Can anyone track down that great post from times passim about Hack/Rogue/Angband on the Blue? The FPP was in the form of the game "graphics" with various monsters and treasure hotlinked... I thought it was posted by y2karl, but I've looked through his posting history and didn't see it and my Google/Search-Fu is suffering from alcohol poisoning... It'd show JHarris that his post is, in fact, completely within "the standard MeFi user's sphere of interest"...
posted by benzo8 at 8:59 AM on August 2, 2005

felix posted that great nethack post.
posted by ubersturm at 9:24 AM on August 2, 2005

That was it! Thanks ubersturm...
posted by benzo8 at 10:04 AM on August 2, 2005

I've played a great deal of ADOM before, but these days it doesn't measure up, in my mind, to Nethack.

This game doesn't either, but then... it's Nethack, baby!
posted by JHarris at 11:57 AM on August 2, 2005

Sounds neat, but I get a Cygwin error upon trying to run it. I suspect this is all some insidious conspiracy to drive me back into the loving, yet flawed arms of Linux.
posted by arto at 11:59 AM on August 2, 2005

I WIN.
posted by blasdelf at 12:06 PM on August 2, 2005

The Game: harder than Nethack.
posted by blasdelf at 6:00 PM on August 2, 2005