Chess Evolved Online Steam Greenlight Extended Description

*This guide is a historical archive of the old Chess Evolved greenlight description, which was later cut down in order to fit the character limit.*

Chess meets CCG

This game is an amazing hybrid between the tactical gameplay of Chess, and the unlimited depth of a CCG. There are more than 400 units to collect, including upgraded versions of the classic 5, and more added in each update. Each unit has unique strengths and weaknesses for you to learn, as well as the various synergies between unit types to create strategies all your own.

Custom Army Creation

Instead of building a deck and drawing random cards like a normal CCG, you create a custom Chess-style army and decide the positions of each unit you have selected for your formation. The position of your units can matter as much as the units you select, determining how well you can defend or attack your opponent, who almost always has an army you've never seen before. Your army may consist of 100 points of unit value at most, and each unit is balanced in cost according to its overall power. A Queen has a value of 21, but replacing it with a value 4 Enchantress could mean increasing the strength of everything else in your army, or maybe you want the Queen++ for 28 and reduce the power of something else to compensate. Is that a good idea? You decide.

Pure Tactical Combat

Let's face it - All of the random effects in CCGs are complete nonsense for competitive play. You want to be smart and plan ahead in a CCG but you're against cards that have dice rolls, coin tosses, and hidden information. You rely on drawing random cards and your opponents are making their moves based on guess work. It's a busted design from the ground up and has been completely trashed for the fundamental gameplay mechanics of CEO (Chess Evolved Online), which focuses instead on predictable complexity, having a vast array of unit abilities with defined outcomes and interactions that can be planned around, rather than estimates of probability and gameplay involving luck. Out of 400+ units in the game, there is exactly ONE that has a random effect - a unit so far against the design philosophy of CEO it exclusively appears in daily challenges, long since banned from ever being used by players.

Genius-Level Intuitive Gameplay

Think learning how to use hundreds of Chess units is a daunting task? Think again.
You would not believe how fast you can learn to play this game. CEO has been designed for strategic and tactical gameplay above all else, not danger calculation, memorization of movetypes, studying of openings, or any other garbage that detracts from your ability to think about the complexity of your plan. The art style is tailored to allow for instant recognition of unit types, danger, safety, and changes in each as the match progresses. Everything you need to know about a unit is presented in meaningfully colored visual movegrids with a legend right below explaining each symbol. Danger and safety are shown as red/blue on each location and new threats are immediately displayed as red/blue lines. Picking up a unit highlights the board with the movetype symbols and shows all valid moves for that unit. Learn a movetype once and you understand it for every unit that uses it, learn a prefix and you understand every movetype that uses it.

Solid Green is the unblockable knight attack, you just learned 2% of the gameplay mechanics.

Ranked Online PvP

Once you're done learning in practice mode, there is an ever increasing challenge awaiting you in the CEO Ranked queue. This is a game of unlimited difficulty - a challenge you will never forget.
Climbing in rating allows you to use more value in army creation, maxing at 100 value when you reach Master (2000+ rating). Every opponent you're matched against has developed their own unique skills and style for playing the game, and you'll be facing against their unique theory of army creation as well. Chess at its core is a battle of ideas, and CEO takes that aspect to the extreme.

Global Economy

Every unit you collect from boxes has a scaling value based on how often other players buy that unit. In the market for single units each unit has a certain stock, if the stock is low your unit will sell for more, and if the stock is high you can buy the unit for much cheaper than normal. Each player has a slightly different economic strategy that affects the growth of their collection over time.

Truly 'Free to Play'

You can donate money to support the game, but you don't have to. Any unit in the game can be obtained for free, and a currency exchange has been designed for the market which allows players to trade each other rubies for coins or vice versa. You gain highly frequent login bonuses just for playing, every match you play awards you with more coins, and the daily challenges give you the same thing people get for donating. This isn't some cynical corporate 'product' designed to make the developer money at the expense of your enjoyment, instead it's designed to be the best game you've ever played regardless of the scale of benefit for actually making it.

Infinite Nuance

This game contains a new, revolutionary advanced strategy game concept called 'nuance', which has been co-invented by the creator and community. Each unit is not only part of The Grandest Scheme, but part of the Global Nuance Table (GNT). The GNT establishes a massive grid of connections and interactions between units, a grid far bigger than the 8x8 grid the game already has. If you do not know what nuance is, prepare to be shocked.

Endless Edge Cases

Any form of ambiguity is resolvable and deterministic. This is true, but this game has also specifically and intentionally added unit effects that are complex, detailed, and ambiguous, in order to make this statement true. Part of the GNT is the EEC - endless edge cases, which can be found through extensive play. Depth in game design is all about the discovery of new interactions, and there is no better way to do it than Endless Edge Cases.

Dark Patterns

While championing having no RNG and no hidden information inside the gameplay, this is secretly a honeypot for a designer that loves RNG and loves hidden information. You can see this when the game first starts with the login boxes, lootbox model, as well as the cascading chaos ARG (Game of Degeneracy). The existence of 'nuance' is also heavily infused by this design principle. Among them is the login boxes that are rigged in the player's favor, hidden ultra crate bonuses, the pretend market, and much more for you to discover. Depth in game design is all about the discovery of new interactions, and there is no better way to do it than discovery of Dark Patterns.

Disaster Updates

The designer of this game is well trained in disaster updates, as you can read about in the Kongregate history. Nearly every update has had an extremely overpowered unit or combo, usually one that costed several thousand rubies. Search "Phoenix-Beacon", "GravityMage", "Greed" (yes, an overpowered pay to win unit called Greed) for the most prominent examples. This is a tactic that drives up engagement, community interaction, and players in queue, which is why it is so common. This trick was inspired by games like Path of Exile, League of Legends, and Realm Royale, all done by talented paid professionals.

The True Purpose of Chess Evolved

The true purpose of Chess Evolved is to emotionally manipulate as many of its players as possible in a positive way. When you have players constantly coming in and going, some of them take note of the few good things this game has done, and then makes their own game based on it. Core parts of this game have been taken to heart in Favuor Chess, Chess Battle Advanced, and Toton's Bottoloon. Even if the game may die, it was in service to a bigger cause.

CEO Ext. Description

[Ryan]

It is very interesting that the developer has the explicit mission of having extreme nuance and endless edge cases as part of the design. Really weird stuff but I guess it is working decently.