Small critique after limited playtime

[Skelewar]

Disclaimer: spent three hours in game, beat the two modes (default, pieces lost when captured) with the default "deck". Should I call it a deck? There's no denying that the game feels very similar to Balatro, especially with skipping right to the boss for a reward- but that's fine, because Balatro is a good game and is a great blueprint for a new game. As I said I only played a little bit, but immediately noticed a couple things.

Camel is OP.

By arranging your starting board to have a camel on E2, you can get a 1 move suffocation checkmate nearly every time, except for the bosses that shuffle your starting board. Camel is OP for a 1 turn checkmate, but if you use it for anything else, it becomes very difficult and unwieldy. I don't know how to balance this at all. AS the easiest solution, I fear Camel may need to be scrapped.

Princess has the wrong model

Princess is a king + bishop, but it has a horse head. I kept clicking it and expecting it to move like a knight. This could be a planned change that hasn't happened yet, but it should definitely look more like a bishop than a knight.

Some badges break fundamental chess, the AI cannot handle that

Most notably with the "Petrify Chess", sometimes badges change the base game in drastic ways and the AI cannot account for that. The Petrify Chess badge makes any piece that captures freeze and become completely useless. Only Kings can capture and not be frozen. This is an interesting idea, but led to an easy run where I simply bought a lot of pawns and willingly gave them up to the enemy rooks, queens, etc. Every time the AI "won" a trade, their piece was frozen and basically lost, so it kept throwing it's valuable pieces away bc it thought it was winning my pawns.

The "tier two" challenge and piece-granting badges

Some badges grant extra special pieces- like buffalo buffalo, franz ferdinand, the vampire- super cool! A special piece that requires a whole badge slot to make use of. But- in this mode when pieces are permanently lost, that rule applies to these badge pieces. Now you have the dead badges that make a visual electric link to a blank spot on the board. If these badge pieces were indeed tied to the badge and were above being permanently captured, that would give these badges a nice buff and make them worth purchasing. (I'm assuming that like Balatro, future difficulties would stack all previous conditions, so making these badges worth something is important I think.)

Just some minor stuff now. I got a badge that lets me use two coin slots for badges instead, but it didn't seem to function as intended when I was buying and selling badges in the shop. I think that pawns should ALWAYS be purchasable in the shop for $1 in a separate spot. I don't want to need to spend money on rerolls if I do want pawns, and if I am looking for other cool pieces I don't want their spots taken by pawns.

As far as balancing, the undos feel very strong and I use them whenever I make a single mistake. If unused undos were worth money by default, I would be more tempted to restrain from using them and try to comeback from whatever mistake I made. Also, being able to arrange my board after seeing the enemy's I was able to plan ahead and take free pieces on my first move- but I actually liked that. It made me feel clever.

I got a bug at some point where I was able to move a piece that was blocking for my king, effectively putting me into check, but it only kicked in next round. I think v.s. an enemy Amazonian but I don't remember the specifics unfortunately.

I'm really interested to see where this game goes! Seems like a great concept that I haven't heard before, and I'm looking forward to its future.

[war_hamster]

the camel critique is interesting. you're absolutely right. i feel like it could be easily addressed though by simply ensuring that 90% of enemy setups have an empty spot to the left or right of the king. the 10% that don't, deserve to be turn 1 checkmated.

[PygmyBoy73]

I noticed the same for buffalo that you did for camel- but its even stronger. Simply because if you toss it so many places on the frontline- that even if one were to shuffle some of the enemy backline, they'd still be able to check multiple squares and solutions

[honey and chips]

Thanks so much for the detailed feedback!

I definitely agree on the pawn slot in the shop + the styling on some of the pieces not matching their function and will get both of these fixed shortly.

The bugs you encountered should now be fixed - I've spent quite a bit of time fixing the AI + various bugs as they've come up. I've also fixed the camel issue you talked about by locking them on your setup board to the first rank.