What it is
Chess Kombat takes the cleanest possible thing — two players, 64 squares, full-information game — and dresses it up in the loudest possible costume. The engine underneath is real: it plays real chess, evaluates real positions, and respects all the standard rules. The presentation on top is a 16-bit fighting game.
Every campaign opponent is hand-drawn pixel art. Each piece has an HP bar that drains as it loses material; lose your queen and the bar takes a chunk. The world map progresses through three themed acts — and the soundtrack changes with the world. It is, in short, what would happen if Street Fighter ate a chess book.
Features
21 hand-drawn opponents
Three acts, each with their own art and music. Difficulty ramps from "club regular" to "you'll need an opening repertoire".
HP-bar damage system
Pieces show health proportional to remaining material. A king alone on the board feels like a final boss with one heart left.
Chess 960 mode
Randomized back rank, mirrored on both sides. Opening prep goes in the bin. Pure middlegame from move one.
Puzzle Survival
Endless mate-in-N puzzles with an HP bar that ticks down with the clock. Wrong moves cost health. How long can you last?
Plays offline
The full engine and all opponents run locally on the device. No account, no servers, no waiting.
Free, source-available
Free on Android, source on GitHub for anyone who wants to fork the engine or remix the art.
Tech stack
Frequently asked
Is Chess Kombat free?
Yes. Free download, no in-app purchases, no ads in the campaign. Source on GitHub.
Does it play real chess?
Yes — the engine respects all standard rules including castling, en passant, pawn promotion, threefold repetition, and the 50-move rule. The "fighting game" layer is purely cosmetic, plus the HP-bar visualization.
What's Chess 960?
Also called Fischer Random Chess. The back rank is randomized at the start of the game (with the same arrangement on both sides, so it stays symmetric). Bishops still go on opposite colors, the king is still between the rooks. Result: opening theory becomes useless, you're playing pure chess from move one.
Will there be an iOS version?
Not on the immediate roadmap. The engine is portable; the bottleneck is the Apple Developer Program fee + App Store review cycle, which doesn't make sense for a free game with no monetization. If demand is loud enough, that calculus changes.