Thank you Sidekick Publishing & Stray Fawn Publishing for sending us this game to review!

Gambonanza is a chess roguelike that feels like someone looked at Balatro and said, "Let's do that, but with chess." That's not just my take; everywhere you look on the internet, you will see this take. The developer himself said so in at least one interview, as well as in the game's own release notes. Everything is there: the pixel-art style, the single-digit earnings to spend on random shops between each game, the limited slots for power-ups that modify how you play (called gambits rather than Jokers), the games being broken up into sets that each end in a boss battle with special rules, it all feels very familiar.

That's where the comparisons end, however. Gambonanza begins each run by giving you three random white chess pieces and tasking you with capturing all of the black pieces without having all of yours captured. Here's the catch: any pieces of yours that are captured are gone forever. You'll need to spend your hard-won earnings at the shop between games to replenish your stock and find ways to improve your odds as the levels get more difficult. The shop always contains a single random chess piece, 3 random gambits, and 3 random tokens. You can also upgrade the maximum number of pieces you can have on the board at once, with each upgrade costing progressively more. You can have up to 7 extra pieces in your stock that you can spend a turn to "land" on your side of the board while a game is in progress.

Gambits are your primary way of improving your chances. They can do anything from granting you extra pieces to allowing you to skip the enemy's turn to even modifying how specific pieces move. Most have limited conditions under which they will work, and some only have partial odds of working. Much of your success will come from good luck and good synergy among your gambits.

Tokens are the other thing you can buy, and there are three types of these: piece, gambit, and tile. Piece tokens give you a random piece. Gambit tokens pick one random rarity level, then give you a choice of three gambits at that level. Tile tokens are the ones I underestimated most at first. These grant you a random tile modifier that changes a tile of your choice for the rest of the run. These modifiers can do things like trap an enemy piece that lands on them or protect your piece from being captured when it lands on it. The caveat here is that the modifier only applies on the turn when that piece moves onto that tile. All 3 types of tokens are sold at one of three ranks, each one costing more and providing you a better chance of getting something valuable.

Each run is split up into 5 series of 5 games. Before each game is a staging phase where you get to see how the black pieces are arrayed and can switch up how yours are arranged before starting the game proper. When either side's side is reduced to a single piece, a counter ticks down until the board itself starts to crumble, dropping two tiles at a time and any pieces that happen to be on them. The last game in each series is one of five random boss fights. Not only do the boss fights impose a restriction on you like being unable to access your stock during the game or not being able to see what pieces your enemy has during the staging phase, but they also have a boss piece that can only be captured after all the other black pieces have been captured. It's not uncommon to find yourself with a single piece doing your best to dodge around and hope the crumbling board saves you from the jaws of defeat.

Should you finally win a run, you will then unlock modifiers and difficulty settings to make the challenge even harder. At least one of the harder difficulty settings includes a secret sixth boss. Personally, I was content with just beating my first run. And that's perhaps the one criticism I can level against Gambonanza: it just doesn't have the same addictive pull that a game like Balatro has, at least for me. I loved that game so much that I bought it on console and then again on mobile just so I could have it with me everywhere I went.

Gambonanza features a pixel art style that is equal parts simplistic and detailed. While the pieces and board are the usual muted colors of a basic chess board, the gambits, bosses, and even tile modifiers are all very colorful and unique and convey precisely the information they need to. It fits this game perfectly. I feel similarly about the music. To my ears, it sounds like the entire game uses a single unbroken track that ramps up in tension as you get closer and closer to each boss. It accentuates the feelings of the game without overpowering them. (I also like how all of the bosses are plays on real life chess masters, like an evil computer with "Deep Blue" printed on it, or a geisha whose name is a play on one of the most accomplished female chess players, Judit Polgár.

Gambonanza's control scheme is very well suited to point-and-click controls, either via mouse or touchpad. I actually did most of my playtime using Steam Link from my phone to my PC, and it was a perfectly fine experience. I did test it out with a controller, and that worked well enough. I did sometimes find it hard to navigate to the exact piece or spot I wanted to, but that was the exception, not the rule. If PC and controller is all you have, it'll work fine, but mouse is a better experience on PC, and the controls make for an excellent mobile game experience; I have no doubt the Android and iOS versions play very well.

Morally, the game is free from all issues in regards to language, violence, sexual, or ethical content. However, the game has tons of references to the occult and spiritualistic, mostly in the forms of the gambits you can obtain. Just as a large handful of examples, there are: Exorcist's Gambit, Black Witch's Gambit, Warlock's Gambit, Lich's Gambit, Necromancer's Gambit, Demon's Gambit, Seraph's Gambit, Aphrodite's Gambit, Goddess's Gambit, Ouija's Gambit (whose icon looks like a Ouija board), Key of Life's Gambit (an image of an ankh), Creature of the Depths' Gambit (looks like Cthulhu's tentacles), and Sacrifice's Gambit (a blue circled pentagram). The boss designs also range from angry-looking to downright terrifying. One is a green spirit with its eye roaming around in its head, and the previously-mentioned geisha has blackened eyes and an unhinged mouth full of sharp teeth.

Gambonanza is a fun game, for a while at least. I finished my first run in about 5-6 hours and collected 160 of the 203 available gambits in that time. Each gambit has some conditions that must be met to be unlocked, so for those who find the gameplay fun enough, there is plenty here to do. I personally find the $14.99 price tag a bit high, but the $5.99 price point for the mobile versions feels spot on. You don't need to be a chess wizard to play, either. As the creator said in his own YouTube ad , "I made a chess game, but I s**k at chess. So I made a game that captures the feeling of making big chess plays without having to be a chess master...." If you have the drive to try and best Gambonanza's final grandmaster, you'll have a lot of fun along the way.

- maestro_dana