King of the Bridge (2024)

delightfully perfunctory! if you've heard the elevator pitch, you know the whole game: you play troll chess, which has unique rules different from regular chess, which you learn one by one each time a nonstandard move is either executed or broken. the troll cheats. if you can prove he cheated, you get to cheat once as well. also the rules favor black, and you are playing white. figure out how to beat the troll.

this was the premise I'd heard, and I'd put off buying the game because I felt like I already got it. but it's 3 dollars and titanium court had put me in a puzzly-and-odd mindset. and... yeah, it's exactly what I expected! it is more or less the exact game I imagined. not that there were no surprises, but surprises of exactly the kind and quantity I'd assumed.

turns out the game I imagined is pretty good, I'm probably a genius designer.

UPDATE: I got the bad ending, the good ending, and the duck ending.

King of the Bridge has a pretty interesting setup. All you have to do is beat a troll at a messed-up version of chess where he makes the rules... he just doesn't tell you all of them at first... or follow them himself. If either of you breaks a rule, the other can break any and all rules on their own next turn in exchange, including just taking the other's king from anywhere. Through trial and error, you'll eventually uncover all the rules and can call him out for his cheating ways by opening your rulebook and matching the rule-breaking piece to the rule it broke.

While the player instantly loses after breaking a rule, the troll does not lose when his king is taken, instead turning one of his other pieces into a new king until all his pieces are gone. This is obviously a massive disadvantage for the player and the core of the game's enjoyable strategic challenge. It's not very easy but never too difficult if you patiently wait for him to mess up, and I had some really fun moments uncovering novel ways to break the rulebook to my advantage after catching him doing the same.

The ultimate challenge, however, is to beat him without stooping to his level, which for me was a pretty tense final showdown that went all the way down to a king vs. king duel on a board full of traps. It's a challenge that takes away the opportunity for creativity presented by the game's main hook, but it was still fun and satisfying in a different sort of way.

Aside from that one repeatable "battle", there is juuust a bit more to the game involving walking around and uncovering some extra information, but that is the majority of it. The game can be completed pretty quickly, but is available for a very low price of $2.99 USD and has multiple endings to uncover. I would definitely recommend it to people interested in a small slice of strategic puzzling.