The Game

CHECKFIRE takes the 8×8 board and the six chess pieces and re-arms them as a modern infantry squad. Movement is chess. Combat is not.

The CheckFire rule #

In chess you may never leave your king in check. In CHECKFIRE the commander is the king, and the rule extends to gunfire: no order may leave your commander threatened — by capture or by a shot, and for a chance shot, by either outcome. It is checked geometrically, so a pinned piece still threatens. The game removes illegal orders before you can give them, which is what makes it read as chess rather than as a wargame: position, tempo and safety matter more than firepower.

A turn is one thing #

Move (chess geometry, melee captures included), fire (weapon geometry, with the hit chance shown before you commit), reload, or use a skill. There are no hit points: a hit removes the piece. Every shot is either Certain (100 %) or Desperate (40 %) — nothing in between, and the HUD says which before you pull.

The pieces #

Skills are off under Core Rules and on under Special Abilities — a ruleset choice made before a match or a deployment, not a separate game. Each skill is single-use, costs the turn, and every skill but Shield Slam empties the unit until it reloads. The AI uses them too. Full text: Field Manual → Special Abilities.

Cover #

Two kinds, told apart by colour on the board. Cover (wire, sandbags) blocks movement but not fire. An obstacle (concrete, rubble, barricades) blocks both — except grenades, which ignore everything. Bunkers, comms towers, laptops on crates and ammo dumps are solid in their own right, which is what makes them worth fighting around.

Four ways to play #

Checkfire Match

One board, full army each side. Win by checkmate, by eliminating every enemy escort (the commander is then captured — he cannot win alone), or when the opponent runs out of legal orders. Control: you vs AI, AI vs AI, or local two-player. Rulesets: Core, Special Abilities, or Classic Chess. Difficulty per AI side. Online: one player creates a room and reads out six letters, the other types them in; the host picks the ruleset. No accounts, no lobbies, no matchmaking, nothing stored — the room forgets you when you leave.

Operation Broken Crown

A finite roguelite campaign. Requisition a squad within a supply budget — one commander and up to fifteen escorts, ordinary chess pieces with no names and no XP — then insert and recover three intel caches on a sector map, find the landing zone, arm extraction, and break the command patrol that answers there. Each sector is a fresh board with its own patrol and objective; cleared ground persists and can be backtracked, but a pressure clock raises patrol strength every few moves. Between fights: recover casualties, secure bunkers for recruits, place barricades and mines, choose supplies for the six-slot Field Pack. Six to twelve sectors. It ends with an after-action report, an S–D rating and the traced map. Nothing carries between runs except one single-use receipt. Details: Field Manual → Operation Broken Crown and Objectives.

Operation Last Pawn Standing

The endless operation. No map, no intel, no landing zone: every board cleared is replaced by the next engagement until the commander falls or the squad withdraws. Same requisition, same rules, same twelve objectives, bonus boards every fifth engagement. The roster starts at six and grows by one every fourth board cleared, to sixteen; a unit is due every fourth board and every fifteen kills, its rank set by how fast the board went. An engagement log keeps every board of the run. Details: Field Manual → Last Pawn Standing.

Classic Chess

Full chess on the same board with the same soldiers: no fire, straight-only pawns with the double step and en passant, castling, promotion, checkmate, stalemate, threefold repetition, the fifty-move rule and insufficient-material draws. The move generator is verified against the standard perft positions. The built-in engine plays at four strengths; the optional Grand Marshal tier runs Stockfish at full strength as a separate process, after you enable it in Settings and accept its GPL v3 licence.

Difficulty #

In operations the enemy difficulty applies to every patrol; operation length is the second axis.

Also #

• Controller play, end to end: menus, a board cursor, MOVE / FIRE on the triggers, an on-screen keypad for room codes. Moving the mouse hands control straight back to it. Tested on a Steam Deck and Xbox pads.
• Seeded and reproducible. Operations are built from seeds, so the same operation plays the same way; 100 % shots consume no randomness.
• Six faction colours — Olive, Slate, Arctic, Black, Blue, Desert — and your own through the Army Wizard.
• Isometric pixel art, five environments with seeded scenery, objective props (jeeps, APC, helicopter, comms tower, laptop, ammo dump, hill zone), three hit styles (sparks, blood, confetti), a flat minimap, and a HUD built to be read at a glance.
• Platform: Windows. The engine is pure C#, so other platforms are technically possible; none is announced.