While there’s a functionally limitless amount of endless runner games out there, every so often a new one will launch with a unique angle that makes it worth checking out, and ChessFinity definitely fits the bill.
This app takes the gameplay of chess but has it on an infinite board that is five squares wide. Like the original game, it takes place in turns with the app trying its absolute best to stop your progress.
As the player you can freely switch between the different pieces but there are limitations. Pieces like the rook, which can move as many squares as they want in the regular game, is instead limited to just four squares instead.
The enemy pieces on the board are ruthless and will always take your pieces down if you land on the wrong square. When this happened that piece is no longer available for use, and you’re shunted back to the last checkpoint. After you’ve cycled through all your pieces you’ll have just the king left, slowly crawling its way down the board at one square per turn. If this piece is taken the run ends.
After having put some time into this title, we must concede that it’s tough. This is a combination of us being generally rubbish at the standard rules of chess, and the fact that the enemy AI doesn’t seem to make any mistakes and will always punish you for bad plays.
As with most games we assume we can get better with time, but we think that maybe sinking some hours into the regular game would be a better way to practice.
Regardless, the other new mechanics here include coins which can be picked up to use in the store, and various powerups such as a second life and a shield.
The coins can be used to level up those powerups, or on cosmetics. At the time of writing the only cosmetics we can see available are silver and gold metallic skins for your pieces (you play as black by default), but these skins need to be bought for each individual piece.
There is, of course, a real money store where you can buy these coins. For R36.99 you can remove all ads, 250 coins costs R24.99 and right at the other end of the scale R109.99 buys 2 000 coins. You can also watch an ad to get a handful of these.
For those who already play a lot of chess we think there’s a lot of fun to be had in ChessFinity, but if you’ve never really gotten into regular chess we don’t think these new mechanics are going to be enough to get you interested. We’d love to see a difficulty option for players like us, and some more interesting skins to spend coins on.
If you’d like to give it a go, the game is free to download on Android and iOS.
