First Look: Chess Rivals
Transcript
Deep Blue, eat your heart out. Hi, it's Ryan from Knights Around a Table. And what do I have here but a game called Chess Rivals? Using movie magic, I'm going to show you the rest. Here's another board. And here's some cards. So, this is a deck-building card battler semi-quasi bag-building tug-of-war kind of thing about chess. Now, it's important that I say it's about chess because this is not chess. This is a board game where chess is the focal point. So, you're going to be simulating a bunch of different chess games, but you don't have to know how to play chess in order to play Chess Rivals. If you do know how to play chess, then some of the stuff on the cards and a few of the terminologies are going to hit with you, I think. You're going to recognize them, and you're going to be like, "Oh, I get that reference." So, there are two versions of the game. I'm showing you the standard version, and there's a deluxe version as well that we're going to get into a little bit later. There's similar stuff going on in each, but of course the deluxe version has more stuff. And here's kind of how it works.
I have one player board set up here, another player board set up here, and then sort of the chess battle arena chessboard simulation thing going on in the middle. So, because it's a deck builder, like most deck builders, you start with a little deck of cards. And everybody starts with the same deck of cards. The idea of a deck builder is that everybody sort of starts with the same crummy cards, and then you take actions within the game to build your deck up to better and better cards. So, in Chess Rivals, we're going to start with the same similar six cards. They're named after chessy kinds of things. We got a knight, we got a king, we got a rook, and then you get four other cards that you get at the beginning of the game in a draft. These are the somewhat better cards. You'll notice, maybe, there's a few different features going on on the cards. You got the card name, we've got sort of symbols down the left-hand side, a couple of actions or symbols down the bottom, and this little grid right here, which I'll explain in a second, but notice that it also has colored borders.
And sometimes it's got a solid color and sometimes it's got a mixed color on the border. So there's a yellow border and there's a complete brown border and this top card that I have, one of the standard ones that comes with my deck, has half green and half I'm going to call that red even though it visually it's closer to a brown and I think they did that for color blind players. So like I said, it's a card battler. So what you're going to do is you're going to shuffle your little deck up and we're going to start with blue facing off against yellow. So I'll show you how that works and then we're going to go up here to this board and then we're going to go to you know yellow faces off against brown and then we go back up to this board and do some other stuff here and then we say brown faces off against uh gray and we go back up here and do stuff on this board. So each a player plays a player and then you do that thing and then another player plays another player you do that thing and that's sort of how it goes. So at the beginning of a match when we have for example blue playing yellow, the blue player is going to go to their deck and draw at random four of the shuffled cards. And then the yellow player is going to go to their draw deck and draw four shuffled cards.
And those are their hands. Well, what's everybody else at the table doing? Well, everybody else is also going to draw four cards from their shuffled hands. Any players who aren't in this match are spectating and they've got a couple of moves that they can play while the two players are battling it out at chess. So the way that you battle it out is we go in five rounds. There's 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 and you grab a card and you lay it down here. That's a blue player's card and then the yellow player is going to look through their hand but a da da da strategize, pick a card and play it to this slot number one. And then simultaneously you both flip over the cards and then you resolve what's on the card and what's on those cards will impact the state of the board in the middle of the two players. Now of course since this is board games you're a little bit limited as to the cards you can play.
The move that I just showed you by the blue player is illegal because those colored borders matter. If your card has a green border, you can only play it in these first two slots, so the first two rounds of the match. If it has a yellow border, you can only play it in these three slots, so two, three, and four. And if it has a brownie red border like this one, it's only good for rounds four or five. So, this card can only be played in those two rounds. And like we saw, some of these cards have multi-colored borders. So, this yellow/brown card could be played in two, three, four, or five because it's yellow and it's brown. So, it can go in the middle ones or it can go in the two end ones. Right. So, with that established, what actually happens when you play a card?
Well, let's say I had this card laid down, the queen. So, I'm going to look at the icons that are on the left-hand side, and I'm going to look at the actions that are down along the bottom, and I'm going to resolve everything. So, look, the queen has two of these red icons. That means I'm the blue player, this is the blue side. Anytime that I have something to my advantage, I want to push one of these four tokens this way, towards my opponent, the yellow player. And anytime the yellow player does something on their cards to their advantage, they're going to try to push those tokens the other way, to my side. So, it's a tug of war. So, if my card has two red icons on it, I'm able to take the red icon and go boop boop and push it two towards my opponent. Now, what you're really trying to do and what really decides the match is move this top token to one side or the other. So, I want that top token to go towards my opponent, and it's really important that I'm able to clear this little draw bar up here because if the match finishes with this token anywhere within these three spaces, it's a draw. And I might not want that. I want to win the match.
I don't don't just want to draw. So, I actually have to push this token past that little envelope, past that draw window. So, if the match ended here with this token there, I would have won if the match ended here, anywhere in here, then my opponent would have won. And if match ends within this draw sort of window, then it's it's a draw. So, if we go back and take a look at some of the iconography on the cards, we can see that they've got different symbols that push the blue king token around, they push the center token around, and we've seen one that pushes the queen pink token around or the red token. Now, each of the three board state tokens does something cool or special when you get it into the second slot. So, once again here, if I push the king to this second slot or beyond to the third slot, that's fine, too, but it triggers on the second slot. That means that if I play any card against my opponent that has a checkmate icon on it, well, then I've automatically won the match, and it doesn't even matter where this little token is within the draw window. If I manage to push the queen token into slot number two or beyond, well, then that means at the end of the match, I get three eval in my favor. So, wherever this token is, I get to go pop pop pop.
And that could be a decisive victory for me. If I'm able to move the center token to slot two, well, that means I get to draw two more cards, and if one of them matches the current round, I can play it in this slot. So, I can double play a card as long as it matches the section of the round where it can be played. So, okay, Ryan, we've seen a lot of stuff that'll move these tokens around, but we haven't seen too much except for that queen power that actually moves this eval token. How does that thing move? Well, wherever the eval token is should be the sum of where the other three tokens are. What I mean by that is, check it out, these three tokens are at 0 0 0, and the eval token is at zero. If this king was over here on one, then the eval token should be at one. If this queen was over here, that's 1 - 2, so it should be 1 - 2, and that's where the eval token should be. And then if we got this guy over here to three, well it should be three more this way. So, whatever, you know, you you add up the numbers here and whatever these numbers are, that's where your eval token should be. That's how that's eval token moves throughout the match.
So, is that everything we need to know about cards? Well, you might have noticed that all the different cards have different actions on the bottom. And they are all written down here on your player board, as well as the powers that we just covered for the king, queen, and center tokens. So, if you play a card with this symbol on it, you can checkmate your opponent as long as the king is in slot two. Likewise, if you want to force the match to a draw, you can play a card with that icon on it. These ones are interesting because they let you increase or decrease the draw window. So, let me show you what that looks like. You have two more of these bridge tokens. So, when you decrease it, you're going to take this guy and swap it out for this one. Or, if you make it bigger, you're going to go, you know, from here to here or from here to this big one. So, now that increases the area where a draw, within which a draw can happen, or decreases it. So, if that's to your advantage, and you get different perks and benefits whether you win, lose, or draw in a match. So, it all depends on which strategy you're pursuing. If you're paying attention, a couple of these card actions seem really unfair. What do you mean like another player just gets to play a card and that's checkmate and I just lose? That doesn't make any sense, does it? Well, it's because we have to look at these tokens. So, each player has a little knight token and a little pawn token here, and they do different things. So, if a player plays a card against you that's a checkmate card because they've got the king, let's say the yellow player has it pushed towards slot number two against me, and checkmate is enabled, and they play a card that says checkmate on it, then I'm going to lose because it's checkmate,
unless I have my knight token available and I can just discard it and prevent checkmate in that round of the game. So, you can prevent that. Likewise, if the other player plays a force draw card against me and says, "Okay, that's it. We're done. The game is a draw." Well, likewise, I can discard my pawn token and nullify that as well. So, I I have a little bit of protection. But, if either of these tokens are gone, and I'll explain why they might be gone in a second, but if either of them are gone at those crucial junctures, then I will have no defense against checkmate, or I will have no defense against force draw. So, that's how those little bits work. One of the actions on the cards says exchange token, and here's how that works. So, if I play exchange token against you, I get to pick either the knights or the pawns, and I remove my knight, and I also get to remove your knight. Or, if I choose pawns, I remove my pawn, and I also remove your pawn.
Or, if this were the situation, like you had both of your stuff, and I didn't have any of my stuff, and I played that exchange pieces, I could just get rid of your your pawn, or I could just get rid of your knight. So, that's how that action works. So, I can strip you of your defenses against force draw, or against checkmate. One of the symbols on the cards lets you draw two more cards, which can be very beneficial. Some of the cards you will play have this draw bag token on them, which says draw tactics. So, I mentioned this was a little bit of a bag builder. Every player gets a drawstring bag that has a number of tokens in them. So, when you play a card with the symbol, you shake it up and grab a token, pull it out, and I've drawn a one. How does that work? Well, it maps onto the card that you just played. So, if I drew a one, and the symbol that's up here is the center icon, well, we go over to the match board, and that's going to push that center token one positive in the direction that I want it to go.
So, I would take the center token and go one more up, which of course would affect the eval. What happens if you play a card that has two icons on it? Which one does the token affect? Well, in that case, you just pick one to move. But wait, that's not all. If when I draw tactics tokens, sorry, one tactics token, if I want to push it even further, I can discard my knight to make it go two more, or I can discard my pawn to make it go one more. So, you can discard your tokens down here to make the evil token go even further, but of course you leave yourself defenseless against checkmate or against force draw. Now, some of you are probably saying, "Ryan, let's see what's in that draw bag. I want to see what I'm up against." Okay, let me dump it out.
We have in the draw bag a bunch of tokens. Some are good, some are bad. So, we have a one, two, three, two ones, two and a three, and then we have a negative one, a negative two, and a negative two. So, you could be hosing yourself by playing a tactics card and pulling out one of these worthless or bad tokens. But, don't worry. I mentioned that there's a little bit of a bag building component to this game. So, later in the game we're going to see a mechanism where you can swap some of these tokens out for better tokens. Then, sort of the last action that we'll take a look at that's on the cards is this one that lets you switch this lever. So, it starts at none and then you've got two different things over here. You've got a defense and you got an offense. So, when you switch your lever, it's kind of steampunk-y, you can switch it to defense or you can switch it up to offense. So, here's how that works. I'm going to put mine to let's see, I'll start at none. I'll put the opponents on defense.
So, what that means is in a circumstance where I've drawn a tactics icon from my bag and I'm pushing this evil token towards my opponent, however many spaces match, you know, the token I pulled out. If they're on defense, then that mitigates my push by one. So, if I draw a one out of my bag, I would normally push it one, but they're on defense, so it gets knocked back. Conversely, if my lever is switched up to offense, that adds one to whatever token I pull out of the tactics bag. So, if I pulled out a one, I get to go here, but I'm on offense, so I get to go another one. But, my opponent's on defense, so I go one step back, and that's how that would work. Now, you don't always have to play a card on your turn. You kind of want to, but there are two other things that you can do instead of playing a card to one of the slots at the top of your board.
You have the option of either pawning or preparing. So, let's say we're on round three of the match, and I've got my deck of cards here, and there's a card in here that I can't play right now. Maybe the border doesn't match, I want to save it for a later slot, or I want to save it even for later in the game. If I choose prepare, I can pull that card out and then play it down here to my prepare area. For the rest of the game, any card that's in my prepare area acts like it's a card from my hand. So, it's kind of like a squirrel stuffing nuts in its mouth for winter. The other thing I could do is pawn. I think it's a double entendre because it doesn't mean pawn like the chess piece. What it means is you get to pick a card and completely scrap it for its component value. There are a couple of different resources in the game, insight and gold.
And so, these cards give you a choice when you play them of grabbing insight or grabbing gold. A certain number of them, the card will tell you how many. This slash means or. So, by pawning [clears throat] one of my cards, I actually remove it from the game entirely, and I get to take the resources listed on the card. What are those resources for? Well, they come into play in the next round that happens in between all of these matches that we're going to talk about shortly. Once you're finished playing a card in any given round, 1 2 3 4 or 5, you draw another card from your deck. Now, that's fine and dandy. It looks like the two players who were playing each other in a simulated chess match are having fun. Well, what is everybody else in the game supposed to doing? Well, remember I told you that they draw four cards each. All players draw four cards. If you are not one of the two players that's involved in the current match, you've got a couple of options. You get to do something on round three of that match and on round five of that match.
And your options are pawn, which you've already discussed, prepare, which you've already discussed, or analyze. So, this actually helps you sort of bet on who's going to win. You can bet on white, you can bet on black, or you can bet that it's going to be a draw. And the way that you bet or analyze, it says, I think maybe they're trying to shy away from the word bet, is you take either your pawn or your horse and knight token and you put it I think white's going to win. Boom. So, the pawn Sorry, the the knight is worth two points and the pawn is worth one point. So, I can be like I can like triple down and that's three points betting that white wins. Or I can kind of hedge. I can be like, oh, I'll put my one pointer on draw and I'll put my two pointer on white wins or, you know, whatever you want to do. Or maybe you don't get at the chance to play both because on three and five you decided to either pawn or prepare.
Whatever happens at the end of that little match, there are rewards and prizes for the people who played and for the people who predicted the outcome. So, down here the winner gets stuff. If it's a draw, there's stuff distributed to all the players. If it's a loss, the loser gets stuff or loses stuff in the case of this token down here. If you predicted correctly for a value of one, so your pawn is in the right place, you get this stuff. If you predicted for a value of two, you get this stuff and three, you get this stuff. So, one way or another there's going to be an end state to that match. Now, what happens? So, here's the common board right here and everybody's got a token on Elo and on fame. What's Elo? Well, that's like a ranking system named after somebody named Elo that kind of predicts how players should be able to play against each other. Who should win and who should lose based on how they've played in the past. So, it's sort of a way of uh matchmaking or handicapping players that are a little bit too strong for some beginner players.
So, there are two different ways to win in the standard game. You can either get your Elo to 2600 or above and your fame to 10 or above simultaneously. So, from this point or onward, we're good. I've won. I'm blue. Great. Or you can win three matches. So, if you win a match, you get to put your little token on the I won spot. And then if you win two matches, boom, I won two. If you won three matches, boom, I won three. And now I've won the game. This little clock here is going to tick away as we do each round. So, there's a match in this board, there's a match in this board, there's a match in this board, there's a match in this board. So, it goes on like that. When we get all the way to nine, if nobody has won either by getting three match points or by getting their Elo and their fame up past these markers, at that point, whoever has the most match points wins. And if there's a tie there, you go to Elo. And if there's a tie in Elo, then you go to fame.
Probably if there's still a tie, yada yada yada, all tied players share in the victory. Now, what's this all about? Well, this is kind of like uh chess town and we're going to visit it using uh the two tokens that we saw earlier, the knight token and the pawn token. So, in player order, we're going to take turns placing these at the different locations and doing things. Most of these are conversions. So, you're taking your knowledge or your money, you're converting one to another. Right here, I can pay two knowledge and six money in order to increase my Elo ranking. Convert knowledge into money. There are locations that let me buy cards. There are locations that let me pull cards from my deck and get rid of them entirely so I can weed out sort of the bad or ineffective cards in my deck. There are locations where I can trade knowledge to get fame points.
And then there's this one. Right here. This is the one that lets me get rid of a bad token out of my bag and replace it with a better one. So, your horseys have to go on the horsey spaces and your pawns have to go on the pawn spaces. Everybody takes turn placing either a horsie or a pawn, choosing different locations, and doing the thing. And then, once that's all done, you do another match with the last two players. So, if blue just played yellow, then yellow plays orange. And that is how the base game of Chess Rivals works. Now, what's different in the deluxe version? Well, let me show you. This board that we've just been talking about doesn't get used in the deluxe version, so let's just get rid of it.
Okay, that's more like it. This is the deluxe version of Chess Rivals. There are a lot of commonalities, but here's one big difference. You now have three different ways to win. You have your standard fame and ELO, but your ELO notice starts at a different number, and your fame starts at a different number, but you have to get them both up to the this zone in order to have a fame victory. You have a similar thing up here, whereas before we wanted to win three matches, this time you're not just playing piddly little matches one-v-one, you're playing an entire tournament where everybody plays everybody. If you win three tourneys, well, that's a victory. And then the third and new one is down here. If you contribute to Chess World, which we'll see in a second, if you manage to construct three new locations and you win at least one tournament, well, then that's a third victory path.
So, what do we mean everybody battles everybody? Well, you've got enough boards in the deluxe version so that if you've got like a four-player game going on, you can just have two-v-two simultaneously. So, it's not like we had spectators in the in the base version where two players had to watch two other players go at it, you can have, you know, one match happening against two players and then two players on this other match on this other match board, and you're you're you know, you're all duking it up. So, down here we have a section so that we can play a round robin where everybody plays everybody, and we have enough tokens to be able to mark what the results of the match were. So, if yellow plays gray, and it's a draw, boom, there's a draw token. If blue plays gray, and blue wins, then boom, we can do this, and blue wins. So, in that tourney phase, everybody plays everybody, and you track the results of the match down here.
The amount of victories and money and knowledge tokens you end up with affects player order. So, you sort of player order over here. But, that, of course, is not the most exciting thing that's going on in this board. What is all this stuff about? Okay, so I didn't mention the story of Chess Rivals off the top, because it's a it's a little hard to wrap your mind around, but generally speaking, there's a supercomputer that runs on chess. It's a steampunk supercomputer, and in order to help it make its calculations, we have to have all kinds of high-level chess matches going on all the time. So, the story is a justification for a world where everything runs on chess, and everybody is a chess grandmaster, or just wants to play chess all the time. So, to that end, all of the buildings and locations in the world are geared towards the interest of chess masters.
Everybody's got a little pawn, and you've got all these sort of bowler-cap-shaped location slots, and you've got a stack of standard locations. We've got another stack of fancier locations that we're going to build that are sort of waiting out here in the wings. And what we do is we have to put these standard locations into a draw bag. So, just throw them in there, and you shake them up, and then starting with the lowest number and going up to the highest number, you pull them all out and stick them in their locations. Now, for four rounds, here's how it goes. In turn order, you're going to take your character and move to location number one, which is this one here. That move is free. But, you get to go to any other location. You're not allowed to camp locations, so you have to move around. And as you travel, you have to pay the travel cost. So, look, we have to pay money here, and we have to pay knowledge as we make the links between the different locations. We'll end up on the locations, and like we saw on the standard game board, there's stuff that we can do.
As with the standard game, a lot of the locations involve us exchanging either money for knowledge or knowledge for money, or buying new cards, or going up with the fame track. But, one of the locations lets us pay money to build a new location. That one will end up on the next number up, and everything at the end of this round, once we've all run around and done stuff, is going to end up back in the draw bag, so that the next time we revisit the city, everything is dealt out randomly in a different order. At the end, let's say these people end up here, here, here, here. We've all shuffled around. People are moving. So, four rounds have happened, and we've all moved around. Now, everybody has to get back to the starting location, and you have to pay either the money or the knowledge in order to get your pawn back there. If you are unable to pay to make it back home, well, that means that in the next match you play, you wake up sleepy, and you have to skip the first of five rounds. So, try not to do that.
There's one other thing I'll mention that will only make sense now that we've seen everything. If you were paying attention, you might have noticed that this bridge has spots to move left or right across the top of the board. So, when does that happen? Well, it's all down to that ELO rating. For every 100 ELO your opponent has on you, that bridge moves towards your opponent. So, check this out. Let's say that it's orange versus yellow, and yellow has 150 ELO advantage over orange. Well, we would have to take that bridge, and for every 100 we move it over, so that's one over. And now, look, orange has to work even harder and move this Evolve token even further to get it past the draw zone in order to not draw the match and to win it. So, that's the effect that a positive Elo or an Elo advantage has on a match. If you're playing the deluxe version with only two players, then you have to play against a robo opponent. That opponent is going to play against you in tournaments and this is sort of how that works. In the first of five rounds, the opponent is just going to top deck one of these These are green, yellow, and red or brown. So, they're going to top deck a green one and that's what they're going to play in the first round. In the second round, they are going to pick one of these four cards and it depends on which one has the most blue symbols cuz the blue symbols on the left here, it's the the first one. So, that's going to be this one. And if it's down to a tie, then you look at the other symbol. So, it would be one of the ones with the most red queen symbols. Then, for round three,
it's just going to top deck the middle card from the yellow row. And then, for round four, it's going to look at these four and it's going to look at the second symbol. So, whichever card has the most red symbols and then the tie breaker is the symbol on the left, so the blue symbol. So, you can grab one of these out of the out of the deck out of the display. And then, for the fifth round, you're just going to top deck this bottom row and that's how that character plays. The robo opponent is also going to run around the city. To figure that out, you're just going to roll this and move it in order. But don't worry because the it's just getting in your way. It's just blocking a location that you can't go to cuz this is one pawn per location. You don't have to track money or insight for the robo player. If this game looks interesting to you and you're catching it in time, it is available on your favorite crowdfunding platform. I'm going to have the link down below in the video. So, follow that link and go check out Chess Rivals.
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