chess, but in tower defense
pick a piece, tap a free square. the dark purple squares are the path.
pick a piece, tap a square. houses need a ♕ power plant on their rank, file or diagonal.
buy pieces, place them on your bottom three ranks, and fight.
pairs, trips, a full house, five of a kind (pawns), a flush (5 same color), or a back rank (knight, bishop, rook, queen, king). beat the blinds, pick jokers, survive five antes.
each unit gets one walk (its chess move) and then one strike on anything it could attack from where it stands. lose your king and it's over. there are two battles: a pawn militia, then the dragon.
you are the ♔. tap a blue square to step one square. red squares will be watched after the guards' next step (ghosts show where they go). a guard sees whatever it could capture, blocked by walls and other guards. stand on a ▣ crate and nobody sees you. get spotted and they hunt you with real chess moves until you stay unseen for three turns.
you start on foot. step onto a parked piece to carjack it and move like it. grab the $ jobs. flattening pedestrians pays $20 but every crime adds a wanted star, and the cops chase with real chess moves (rookie ♟, then ♞ ♝ ♜ ♛). the SPRAY garage clears your stars. reach $1000.
stamp pawns by hand, then buy machines that make them for you. every piece you finish sells automatically; spend the gold on faster machines and on the next kind of piece, all the way up to the chess dragon. your factory keeps running while you're away.
long corvid: a flock raids the vault every 40 seconds, machines get dearer faster, and the dragon target is 5000 a second. scarecrows cut the theft. it keeps its own save.
tap a lit square to fly there with your aircraft's chess move; the number is the fuel it burns. mountains block sliders (the helicopter hops them). ⛈ storms drift each turn, the pale squares show where they'll be next, and ending a turn in one costs hull and fuel. ⛽ pads refill the tank. land on the green airport.
every move of Morphy's Opera Game falls down the board as a note, in the lane of the piece that moved: ♟ pawns (D), ♞♝ minor pieces (F), ♜ rooks and castling (J), ♛♚ royals (K). arrow keys work too, and you can tap the lanes. captures are chords with the neighbouring lane. hit each note as it crosses the line, keep the combo alive, and finish with checkmate on beat 33.
you are a lone king; only the blue dot in his chest can be hit. he fires on his own. move with arrow keys or WASD (hold shift to slow down), or drag on the board. space or X castles, wiping the screen of bullets. pawns aim, knights hop and fan out, bishops fire diagonals, rooks rain straight lines, and the giant queen waits at the end. squeaking past bullets scores grazes.
the board closes tonight. who do you tell?
you are a pawn with ten days. each day, pick one piece and one way to approach them (named for how a piece moves). each loves exactly one approach, likes another, and is put off by something else; the emoji beside a name remember what you tried. everyone you ignore cools off a little. on the last night, confess to someone, or walk away.