The year is 1840, the Victorian era and the beginning of the industrial revolution. You’ll need to beat out your other Chess Rivals by either becoming the most famous chess prodigy, develop chess projects or become the ultimate chess master to win!
You’ll start the game by drafting your chess deck, which will be what you will play in the Chess Game to try to beat your opponent and raise your ELO score. You’ll want to balance your deck between opening, middlegame and endgame cards to ensure that you have what you need to crush your competition.
Each player will match up against their opponent to battle it out in the chess game. In each of the 5 rounds, you’ll only be able to play opening, middle or end game cards, depending on the round. When you play a card, it will move the token toward your side of the EVAL board a certain number of spaces, based on the strength of the card. The cards can also increase other factors that will affect the game, such as Checkmate, Queen Side Synergy, Center Control and more. These will give you bonuses or special powers during the game.
At the end of this tug of war, you’ll look at your EVAL score to see if you’ve managed to exceed the required number to win the game. If not, the game ends in a draw.
After each player faces off against each other in the Chess Game, you’ll move onto the Map Phase, where you will be moving around the map picking up bonuses, like adding cards to your deck, earning money, or developing projects. Each space that you move costs you $1. At the end of four rounds, you’ll need to move back to the starting space so that you can make it back to the Chess Game! Make sure you keep enough money in reserve to move yourself back to the starting space, because if you don’t, you’ll be late to the game and will not be able to play in the first round!
Play continues until someone wins by either achieving the highest fame, becoming the ultimate chess champion by raising their ELO score to the necessary level, or by completing the required amount of projects!
—description from the publisher
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- I'm going to try to film three videos today if I can.
- The problem is I direct as I go. My feet are directing the shot.
- The biggest problem is I don't want to push myself to film a game earlier than I'm ready to.
- The problem is you take on too much at once and it all becomes a blur as you try to keep up with just too many too many things, too many balls that you're juggling all at the same time.
References (from this video)
- Chess championship
- Millennium Blades
Mechanics (from transcript analysis)
- Card battle — This is kind of a five think Millennium Blades five card battle kind of rounds.
- Engine Building — But you're building up chess components in there and and then there's an engine build component between.
Video topics + discussion points
Quotes (from this video)
- Welcome to May 2026 where we're talking about our favorite games of last month, which is April 2026.
- So many, many great tips from all of you on our previous flock of not actually last month. It's UKGE anticipated games and also asking you to for our travel to UK.
- I like our way better.
- If you know any board games meet up in the evening one
- This is a game that is 10 years old.
- You have to plan out your actions.
- So you're constantly managing this inventory of tokens of houses that you can build up.
- The unique part is that the assistant action where you just spread out your assistant.
- That's really is unique. It's very Yokohama. Like I have not played any games that's quite like that actually.
- So, this is the Dungeon Crawler Carl version of the game already out by John D. Clair called Unstoppable, which is a card crafting building game based on the popular lit RPG series Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman.
- Unstoppable was my in my top games of last year.
- It's a game where Yeah, it takes card crafting to like a three-dimensional level almost because you are endorsing two cards together and one of them is a threat, and you have to defeat that threat for it to then join your hand as a card that you play, and then you can upgrade that twice, which makes the card stronger, but also the threat stronger.
- Your deck is your enemy. Your enemy got bitten and then that becomes your deck by flipping it and then once it's cycle out and then it becomes enemy again and so on and just like this what do you call it? The treaty cycle? Yeah, it's a thing.