Games Like Passant, Sorted by How Much Chess Is Left
The short answer
If you only take one, take The Ouroboros King. It is the closest thing on Steam to what Passant actually is: a whole chess position against a whole enemy army, one piece moved per turn, with pieces and relics rewriting the rules underneath you. Its entry below carries the evidence.
Everything else forks, because most games filed under this genre are not playing chess. They borrow a knight’s movement and build something else on top. So this page is sorted by one question: how much of a real chess game is left. Stop reading at the group you wanted.
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. The wider genre list lives in the best chess roguelikes.
What Passant is doing, in four parts
Marc Makes Games is specific on the Steam page, so all four of these are quoted from that page.
- You play matches, not encounters. The page asks you to “beat match after match of increasing difficulty until you can beat the final boss and become a grandmaster.” The unit of progress is a full game of chess against an AI, and that is rarer here than you would expect.
- The pieces are new and the board is still legal. “Unique pieces, such as the Archbishop, Dragon Knight, Dragon King and more” get bolted onto a position that otherwise obeys the ordinary rules.
- Badges rewrite the whole run. “Twists on traditional chess, such as Atomic Chess, Reflecting Bishops and Zombie Pawns.” This is the roguelike layer, and it sits on top of the chess underneath it.
- Items break the rules on purpose. “Freezing a piece, demoting a piece to a pawn, or promoting one of yours to a queen.”
There is a fifth thing worth knowing before you shop: the page offers “challenge modes and increasing levels of AI difficulty”, so the opponent is tunable. Only two games further down this page let you do that, which matters if you bought Passant because you wanted a chess opponent you could actually set to your level. If that was the appeal, chess games for people who are bad at chess is the closer match to what you want.
Passant and the ten, at a glance
The first row is the game you are matching, so every figure under it has something to sit against. All of them were read from Steam and checked in August 2026.
| Game | Released | How much chess is left | Price (USD) | Steam reviews |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Passant: A Chess Roguelike (the game you are matching) | 2025 | Full matches, new pieces, rewritten rules | $11.99 | Mostly Positive, 369 |
| The Ouroboros King | 2023 | Full army, one move per turn | $9.99 | Very Positive, 569 |
| Gambonanza | 2026 | Full army, new win condition | $14.99 | Mostly Positive, 1,613 |
| Usurper | 2024 | Checkmate, army built from cards | $9.99 | Mostly Positive, 48 |
| 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel | 2020 | Legal chess plus one enormous rule | $11.99 | Overwhelmingly Positive, 8,958 |
| Chessarama | 2023 | Eight chess-inspired games plus classic chess | $14.99 | Very Positive, 180 |
| Chess Remix | 2023 | Historic variants, played straight | $14.99 | Mixed, 10 |
| Gambetto | 2026 | Chess-like pieces, card game rules | $4.99 | No user reviews |
| Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate | 2022 | One king, chess movement, a shotgun | $9.99 | Very Positive, 7,403 |
| Pawnbarian | 2021 | Chess movement, no opposing army | $9.99 | Very Positive, 894 |
| Chessformer | 2022 | Chess movement, no opponent at all | $4.99 | Very Positive, 321 |
Group one: still a chess match, with the rules rewritten
These four keep an opposing army on the far side of the board. If the part of Passant you liked was that it was recognisably a game of chess, start and finish here.
The Ouroboros King (2023)
Buy The Ouroboros King first, and buy it even if you usually skip anything with the word roguelike on it. Oriol Cosp Games keeps chess movement intact, adds fairy pieces, relics and consumable items, and holds you to one piece moved per turn against the Coven’s army. Two lines on its store page decide the recommendation: the game promises “15-45 minute runs, good for a short break and also longer sessions”, and “No gatekeeping, all the content is unlocked from the start.” The second one is worth pausing on, because unlock trees are the standard tax in this genre and this game refuses to charge it. What you give up against Passant is the opponent dial: there is no AI difficulty slider, only the run in front of you, and games like The Ouroboros King is where the rest of that shape lives.
Gambonanza (2026)
Blukulélé builds a run around “over 150+ powerful Gambits that alter the rules and properties of your run”, which is the same move Passant makes with Atomic Chess and Zombie Pawns, done at roughly ten times the scale. Take Gambonanza if Passant’s badges were the part you kept talking about. The board is smaller and the win condition changes with it: the page says “victory isn’t about capturing just the king; it’s about capturing every single piece on the board”, and if you waste too many moves the board crumbles under you. Tile upgrades sit beneath the pieces, golden squares and blessing tiles among them. The caution is reception, which the shared Mostly Positive label hides: it sits at 75.6% positive against Passant’s 79.9% (as of August 2026), and it costs three dollars more.
Usurper (2024)
Usurper is worth buying if you want the deck to do more work than the movement does. Rogue Brain Studios has you “play cards from your deck to drop units onto the battlefield”, stockpiling Power to afford “expensive and powerful units like the Queen and Cannon”, and the goal on the page is still to “checkmate your opponent”. Four factions, thirteen bosses and ten difficulty levels sit on top of that, and those ten levels are one of only two opponent dials anywhere on this page. The warning is the sample size: 48 reviews is the thinnest base behind any label here. This is also where the genre crosses into chess deckbuilder territory properly.
5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel (2020)
Conor Petersen and Thunkspace add one change to legal chess, described on the page as “the first ever chess variant with spatial, temporal, and parallel dimensions”, where you move pieces back in time into branching timelines and a rook can be sent to a parallel board. Get 5D Chess if you want the rule twist without the run, and be honest with yourself about the difficulty. There is a single-player path: you “practice against four different AI personalities, each with different strengths and styles”, plus a set of multiverse puzzles. It carries the highest Steam review band on this page, Overwhelmingly Positive, and it is also the hardest thing here to sit down with cold. There is no run structure, no draft and no badge to save a bad position, so if the roguelike scaffolding was what made Passant approachable, this removes exactly that.
Group two: chess rules remixed, without the run
These three rework what pieces do and leave the roguelike out. There is no run to lose, so you can put one down mid-session and find out whether the variant rules or the run structure was the appeal.
Chessarama (2023)
Minimol Games describes it as “a collection of original puzzle and strategy games inspired by Chess”, eight of them, with names like Dragon Slayers, Lady Ronin, Pawn Mania and Soccer Chess, over a hundred campaign puzzle levels, and a classic chess mode sitting alongside. Chessarama is what I would hand someone who liked Passant’s unique pieces and did not care about losing a run. It is the broadest survey of “what if chess, but” on this page, and it is a puzzle collection: nothing carries between the games and nothing is lost when you fail. If that survey is the appeal, chess variants in video games walks the same ground at length.
Chess Remix (2023)
I would only reach for Chess Remix if the historic variants are the draw, and I would want you to see the numbers first. Alexander Everett collects Shogi, Xiangqi, Janggi, Makruk, Chaturanga, Courier Chess and Tamerlane Chess, with more than a hundred pieces across the set, an AI to play against, hand-designed teaching levels and a level editor for building your own. One figure makes this recommendation conditional: it sits at Mixed, on ten reviews. Ten reviews is an absence of a verdict, and I am naming the game here because nothing else on Steam in this list covers the same historical ground.
Gambetto (2026)
ThisIsNotEddy “blends traditional CCG with the logic and elegance of chess” on a compact 5 by 5 board, where movement cards, piece abilities and combo spells are all drawn from a faction deck, and you still win by capturing the king. Gambetto is the newest thing on this page, out since July 2026, and the one to skip if you play alone. Custom games let you set the rules, turn timers and deck restrictions yourself. Here is the disqualifier for most Passant players: its Steam categories list no single-player mode at all, so the game is online play against other people, and there is no AI opponent to grind against on a quiet evening. A month after release it has collected no user reviews, so nobody has told you whether the matchmaking is populated.
Group three: the pieces without the match
The famous names in this genre are down here, which is the reason the standard lists mislead a Passant player. All three are good games, and none of them puts a chess match in front of you.
Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate (2022)
PUNKCAKE Delicieux gives the premise in one line: “Chess, but all your army has gone over to the white side, leaving you with nothing but your royal shotgun and your wounded pride.” Buy Shotgun King if that sentence made you grin and you can accept that it inverts everything Passant does. Each turn you either move or shoot, and shooting costs you the next move to reload. Runs are quick, around twenty minutes by the page’s own estimate, against Passant’s open-ended matches. The gap from Passant is total: you command no army, you are avoiding checkmate instead of delivering it, and the upgrades are drafted two at a time with one going to the enemy. If that inversion is what hooks you, games like Shotgun King is the next stop.
Pawnbarian (2021)
Pick Pawnbarian if what you want is the piece movement compressed into a fifteen-minute puzzle. j4nw hands you one hero and a hand of cards, and the card you play decides how the hero moves, so a knight card makes you jump like a knight across “a tiny dungeon board”. Runs are 15 to 30 minutes and its page states plainly under Not Features that there are “No permanent upgrades, and not much that needs unlocking”. That last line makes it the cleanest counterexample to Passant’s unlock-driven collection of pieces and badges, and games like Pawnbarian carries the full comparison.
Chessformer (2022)
Chessformer earns a place here only if you want the pieces and none of the fight. Robert Alvarez built a gravity puzzler where each piece moves as chess says it should and then falls until something stops it, and stacking pieces on top of each other is how most levels resolve. There is no opponent, no randomness and no run, so this is the furthest point on the page from Passant’s structure while being close to it in vocabulary. It is also the cheapest thing here alongside Gambetto.
Where our own game sits
One caveat before the last entry, because it is ours. It is unfinished, nobody outside the studio has played it, and it does not belong in the ranking above. It is here because a reader who got this far is clearly shopping the chess-plus-a-run shelf and may want to know what else is coming to it.
Hellmate is roguelike deckbuilding chess set in the seven floors of Hell. Each floor belongs to a deadly sin and every sin crowns its own king, and you summon pieces and cast spells with mana to melt that king’s HP before your turns run out. Sigils brand your army, and Soul Coins buy permanent upgrades between runs.
On this page’s one axis it lands in group two rather than group one: you fight a board battle against a single king, and mana and spell cards do the work Passant hands to items and badges. It is unreleased, due 19 January 2027 on Windows and macOS, so there are no scores or sales to point at yet. You can wishlist Hellmate on Steam, and the structure it borrows is picked apart in what makes a good roguelike.
Quick answers
Which game here is closest to Passant? The Ouroboros King. It is the only game on this page that keeps a full enemy army, standard chess movement and a roguelike run at the same time, and it hands you fairy pieces and relics the way Passant hands you unique pieces and badges.
Do any of these let me set the AI difficulty like Passant does? Two, by their own store pages. 5D Chess offers four AI personalities and Usurper lists ten difficulty levels. I did not verify the other eight either way, so their entries here say nothing about it in either direction.
Which of these are actually chess, and which just look like it? Four are chess: The Ouroboros King, Gambonanza, Usurper and 5D Chess all put a real army on the other side of the board. Chessarama and Chess Remix are chess without a run. Gambetto, Shotgun King, Pawnbarian and Chessformer keep the pieces and drop the match.
What is the cheapest way to try the genre? Two games share the low price on this page: Chessformer and Gambetto, both under five dollars. Chessformer is the safer of the two for a solo player, since Gambetto’s Steam categories list no single-player mode.
Prices, review counts and release dates on this page were read from Steam and updated August 2026, and they move, so check the store before buying.
