Chess Variants in Video Games (Rules vs Roguelikes)
Updated October 2, 2026
The phrase covers two unrelated shelves
Search for chess variants in video games and you get two kinds of thing stapled into one list. On one shelf are the published rulesets: Chess960, atomic, three-check, crazyhouse, shogi, xiangqi. Boards you could set up on a table if you owned the pieces. On the other shelf are Steam roguelikes that keep the knight’s L, drop everything else, and often drop the opponent too.
The verdict, before either list: if you meant the published rulesets, The Chess Variants Club is the cheapest complete answer on Steam at $4.99, and lichess runs more of them for nothing. If you meant the roguelikes, start with Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate.
Updated August 2026.
What counts as a chess variant
A chess variant is a game that keeps chess as its base and changes one published rule: where the pieces start, what a capture does, or how you win, so the board stays recognizable while the plan changes.
That edge is what makes the term useful. lichess runs eight variants: Crazyhouse, Chess960, King of the Hill, Three-Check, Antichess, Atomic, Horde and Racing Kings. Chess960 is the one carrying institutional weight, since Fischer introduced it publicly on 19 June 1996 in Buenos Aires and FIDE added it to an appendix of the Laws of Chess in 2008.
None of that lives on Steam by default. The browser sites got there first and gave the variants away, so the paid market never had a reason to compete on the same rulesets. What Steam has instead is a handful of odd, specific answers.
Rule variants you can actually buy on Steam
There are five, one of them costs $49.99, and one of the most visible chess products on the store ships no variants at all. Steam prices and review counts below were checked in August 2026.
| Game | What it ships | Price (USD) | Steam reviews |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Chess Variants Club | Twelve named variants including Chess960, Atomic, Three-Check, Circe and Los Alamos | $4.99 | 55, Very Positive |
| Chessarama | Eight themed rule sets built on real piece movement | $14.99 | 180, Very Positive |
| Chess Remix | Shogi, Xiangqi, Janggi, Makruk, Chaturanga and other regional forms | $14.99 | 10, Mixed |
| 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel | One variant taken to its limit: moves into past boards and parallel timelines | $11.99 | 8,958, Overwhelmingly Positive |
| Omnichess | No preset library. Square, hexagonal or triangular boards, pieces you define yourself | $49.99 | 8, too few for a score |
The Chess Variants Club is the one to buy when the word variant meant what lichess means by it, because it is the only cheap Steam product carrying Chess960, Atomic and Three-Check in one box, and it ships more than 400 puzzles built on those same rulesets. Its limitation is stated plainly on the store page: you play the computer, a friend on the same screen, or Remote Play Together, so no ranked pool is waiting for you.
Street Soccer and Lady Ronin are two of the eight games inside Chessarama, and the pieces in them move by real chess rules rather than by something chess-flavoured, which makes it the buy for a player who wants the movement system carried into games that are not chess at all. Its Steam page credits Minimol Games, the same developer listed on The Chess Variants Club.
Shogi, xiangqi, janggi, makruk and chaturanga in one box: Chess Remix is the buy when your interest is regional rather than western, since it is the only product I found treating those forms as a single collection. With ten reviews you are buying on the store page and nothing else.
Moves that reach back into past boards and sideways into parallel timelines are the whole of 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel, one rule change pushed until it hurts, and its 8,958 reviews against the 55 on The Chess Variants Club say which approach found an audience.
Omnichess is a design tool wearing a game’s clothes: square, hexagonal or triangular boards, pieces whose moves you write yourself, and no preset library to fall back on. At $49.99 with eight reviews it is the riskiest purchase on this page by a wide margin.
Not a variant product, but people keep buying it expecting one: Chess Ultra is standard chess with ten AI levels, online play and VR support, at $12.99 with 2,313 reviews and a Mostly Positive score (checked August 2026). It is what you actually wanted if the goal was plain chess with strong AI. The best known plain-chess product on Steam contains zero variants, so the store has very little to offer a Chess960 search.
Chess as raw material
A chess roguelike is a run-based game built on chess piece movement: you clear a series of short board encounters, draft upgrades between them, and a single loss ends the whole run instead of one match. That is a genre borrowing a movement system, and the chess roguelike roundup covers it properly.
| Game | What it keeps from chess | Price (USD) | Steam reviews |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate | A lone black king against a full white army, plus a shotgun | $9.99 | 7,403, Very Positive |
| Pawnbarian | Piece movement dealt as a hand of cards on a tiny dungeon board | $9.99 | 894, Very Positive |
| Passant: A Chess Roguelike | Whole matches, with badges that rewrite the rules between them | $11.99 | 369, Mostly Positive |
| The Ouroboros King | Army building with fairy pieces, one move per turn | $9.99 | 569, Very Positive |
| Usurper | Checkmate as the win condition, units played from a deck | $9.99 | 48, Mostly Positive |
| Chess: The Lost Pieces | A real opening army, then thirty new piece types drafted into it | $7.99 | 22, Mostly Positive |
Shotgun King is the one to start with, because the asymmetry does the teaching for you and the upgrade choice after every floor arms your enemy as well as you. Runs of fifteen to thirty minutes, the figure the developer gives, on a board small enough to read in one glance: that is Pawnbarian, the pick when the session is short. Fairy pieces and relic stacking instead of a shotgun make The Ouroboros King the one for players who came for army building. Your king has to walk forward before you have the range to play cards at all in Usurper, which puts deck players ahead of chess players in the queue for it. The detail on its store page that caught me: you stockpile Power to afford a queen, so the strongest piece in chess turns into an economic decision.
The overlap
The interesting cases sit on the seam, and both of them are worth more attention than the generic lists give them.
Passant: A Chess Roguelike is the strongest bridge, because it plays full matches and then hands you badges that install real variant rules mid-run, Atomic Chess among them, alongside invented pieces like the Dragon Knight. A pawn that has to charge before it moves is the kind of rule no published variant uses, and Chess: The Lost Pieces is built out of them, starting you with a rook, a knight and a bishop and letting you recruit from there. If you want the card-driven end of that seam, what a chess deckbuilder is draws the line between drafting pieces and drafting cards.
Which one to buy
If you can only buy one, buy Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate; if the word variant in your search meant Chess960 and atomic rather than a roguelike, buy The Chess Variants Club instead and treat lichess as the free companion to it. Readers who came here because standard chess never clicked will get more out of chess games for people bad at chess, and readers who came for the run structure rather than the board will get more out of what makes a good roguelike.
Quick answers
Can you play Chess960 and atomic chess on Steam? Yes, in The Chess Variants Club, which carries both plus ten more named rulesets. Outside that one product they are almost absent from the store, while lichess runs both in the browser at no cost.
Is a chess roguelike the same thing as a chess variant? No. A variant changes a published rule and keeps the match; a roguelike keeps the piece movement and replaces the match with a run of short encounters and drafted upgrades.
How many variants does lichess run? Eight: Crazyhouse, Chess960, King of the Hill, Three-Check, Antichess, Atomic, Horde and Racing Kings. Chess960 is the only one of those with a FIDE appendix behind it.
Does Chess Ultra include variants? No. It is standard chess with ten AI levels, online play and VR support, which is worth knowing before you buy it hoping for Chess960.
Our own game
Our own Hellmate belongs on the second shelf by the definition at the top of this page: it borrows piece movement, builds a run around it, and implements none of the published rulesets. It is roguelike deckbuilding chess set in the seven floors of Hell, where each floor belongs to a deadly sin and every sin crowns its own king, and you summon pieces and cast spells with mana while melting that king’s HP before your turns run out. It is not on the list above because it is unreleased: on Steam for Windows and macOS with a release date of 19 January 2027, and nothing yet to point at in the way of player numbers. If the sin-per-floor structure is the part that interests you, we wrote about the seven deadly sins in video games separately.
How these figures were checked
Every price and review count on this page comes from the game’s own Steam store page, read in August 2026, and each price is the regular one, since a discount ages in days. Review counts move, so read them as a rough shape. The variant lists come from each store page’s own description and from lichess, and the Chess960 history comes from FIDE.
