Games Like Really Bad Chess You Can Play on Steam
Really Bad Chess is not on Steam
Updated August 2026.
Really Bad Chess is a phone game and it has stayed one. Zach Gage put it on iOS in October 2016 and it is still there, free to download on the App Store with a single in-app purchase, with an Android build published on Google Play by Noodlecake. There is no Steam version. If you came here after searching the store and finding nothing, that is why.
If you met the game on a newspaper games page, that is probably why you were searching. Really Bad Chess runs as a daily puzzle on the San Francisco Chronicle games page, in the same row as the word games.
| Where to play Really Bad Chess | Platform | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| App Store | iPhone and iPad | Free download plus one in-app purchase that unlocks local versus mode and removes ads (as of August 2026) |
| Google Play | Android | Free download, listed as containing ads and in-app purchases (as of August 2026) |
| SF Chronicle games page | Browser | One new board every day, run through Puzzmo |
Everything I recommend below is a Steam game, on purpose. You were already in a store you can buy things in.
What the random pieces were actually for
Gage’s own store listing explains the design in one sentence: with a random army “you’ll have to throw out your openings and your understanding of normal patterns of play.”
That is the whole trade. Knowing how a knight moves is the entire entry fee, and none of the studying that makes someone good at chess helps you. So the filter for this list was narrow: chess movement in, chess homework out. A game that expects you to recognise an opening did not make it, however good it is.
One term comes up repeatedly below. 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. Most of the strong PC answers to this search are in that shape, and the full chess roguelike roundup covers the ones that are harder than what you are asking for.
Which one to buy
Buy Chessarama. It is the only game here with a daily and weekly rotation, so it is the one that rebuilds the actual habit: a fresh board waiting for you, finished in one sitting, no run to commit an evening to. If the chaos was the part you liked, buy Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate.
| Game | Price | Steam reviews | What carries over from Really Bad Chess |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chessarama | $14.99 | Very Positive, 180 | Daily and weekly challenges, standard piece moves, new goals |
| Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate | $9.99 | Very Positive, 7,403 | A deliberately lopsided army |
| Pawnbarian | $9.99 | Very Positive, 894 | Small board, one problem at a time |
| Passant: A Chess Roguelike | $11.99 | Mostly Positive, 369 | Real matches against an AI |
| Gambonanza | $14.99 | Mostly Positive, 1,613 | Armies that should not be legal |
| Chessformer | $4.99 | Very Positive, 321 | Pure puzzle, no opponent thinking back |
| The Ouroboros King | $9.99 | Very Positive, 569 | Assembling a strange army from nothing |
| Usurper | $9.99 | Mostly Positive, 48 | Cards decide what reaches the board |
| Chess: The Lost Pieces | $7.99 | Mostly Positive, 22 | Pieces that do not exist in chess |
Prices, review scores and review counts come from each game’s Steam store page, checked August 2026. Prices are the regular US price, so a sale will show you less.
The nine, with what each one is for
Chessarama
Chessarama packs eight separate chess-inspired games under one roof, each keeping the standard piece moves and swapping the goal: in Dragon Slayers you walk a pawn down a path while a dragon attacks the board every time you move, in Lady Ronin a queen shoves pieces around a Sokoban board to reach a Shogun. It carries daily and weekly challenges, which is the closest thing on Steam to the Chronicle’s one new board a day, and it includes plain chess if you ever want it.
Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate
You are a lone black king with a shotgun against a full white army, and each turn you either move or shoot, then move again to reload. After every floor you choose between two random pairings of one upgrade for you and one upgrade for the enemy, a much more pointed version of the imbalance Really Bad Chess hands out at random. Runs are about twenty minutes. Buy it if the part you loved was the unfairness. There is a longer breakdown of it here.
Pawnbarian
One hero, a small grid full of monsters, and a hand of cards that decides which chess piece you are allowed to move like this turn. Pawnbarian is the buy if you liked the size of a Really Bad Chess board more than the chess of it. It is the most portable idea on the list and the easiest to explain to somebody watching over your shoulder. If it lands, more games in its shape are here.
Passant: A Chess Roguelike
You play matches against an AI and then break the rules between them, drafting pieces like the Archbishop and the Dragon Knight, picking up items that freeze a piece or demote it to a pawn, and taking badges that apply twists such as atomic captures or zombie pawns. Passant is the one that still feels like playing chess, so it is the right buy if what you want is a whole game with the rules bent. It ships several AI difficulty levels, so it does not assume you are good.
Gambonanza
Gambonanza is the best match for the specific moment of opening Really Bad Chess and finding eight knights. Winning a board means clearing every enemy piece off it, the board crumbles if you waste moves, and between rounds you spend money on gambits that rewrite the rules and on upgrades to individual tiles. Its own store page calls the combinations illegal, which is roughly the register.
Chessformer
Every piece moves the way it should, then falls until it lands, and pieces stack on each other, so a level is a route-finding problem built out of rook and bishop moves. The enemy king never moves and the game tells you not to worry about losing pieces, so nothing here is playing against you. It is also the cheapest thing on the list, which makes it the low-risk way to find out whether chess-movement puzzles are for you at all.
The Ouroboros King
The Ouroboros King has you assembling a force fight by fight, finding relics and buying gadgets between encounters with the Coven. It is the most conventionally deep chess roguelike here, and the one to buy if you liked being handed an odd army and wished you had picked it yourself.
Usurper
You push your king forward so you can play cards nearer the front, stockpile Power to afford expensive units like the Queen and the Cannon, and draft your way through four factions and thirteen bosses. Usurper is the buy if the deck interests you more than the board, and it is a chess deckbuilder in the strict sense. With 48 reviews it has one of the two thinnest counts on this list, so treat that row as a weak signal.
Chess: The Lost Pieces
Chess: The Lost Pieces invents pieces. Thirty-plus of them, including a rook that pulls distant pieces toward it, a knight that grows more mobile the longer it survives, and a queen that captures whatever captured her. It is the roughest thing here and it earns its place because nobody else does that. Twenty-two reviews is not enough to tell you whether it holds up, so read that row of the table as a shrug rather than a score.
The one that looks like a match and is not
5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel is the usual suggestion on this question, and for a Really Bad Chess player it points the wrong way. Really Bad Chess takes rules away so that you can stop studying. 5D Chess adds a spatial, temporal and parallel dimension on top of chess, which means more to learn, not less. It is a fine game and it is the opposite errand. Other chess variants worth knowing covers where it fits.
If none of the above is quite it, the companion piece to this post is chess games for people who are bad at chess, which is organised around the skill problem itself.
Where our own game sits
Hellmate is ours, so it belongs beside this list rather than inside it. It is a roguelike deckbuilding chess game set in the seven floors of Hell, where each floor belongs to a deadly sin and every sin crowns its own king: you summon pieces and cast spells with mana, brand your army with sigils, and try to melt the king’s HP before your turns run out. It is unreleased, with a Steam date of 19 January 2027 for Windows and macOS, so there is nothing to judge it by yet beyond the store page itself.
Quick answers
Is Really Bad Chess available on Steam?
No. It is an iOS and Android game from Zach Gage, first released in October 2016, and it has never shipped a PC version. The nearest thing on a computer is the daily board on the SF Chronicle games page.
Do I need to know chess to play the games on this list?
No. None of them expects opening theory or any prepared study, and knowing how the six pieces move is enough to start every one. Several then add pieces of their own, and Chessformer and Chessarama go furthest, since both teach their rules from scratch inside the puzzles.
Which of these work in five-minute sittings?
Three. Chessarama and Chessformer are built out of single boards that end when you solve them, and Pawnbarian’s small-grid fights are the closest thing here to a phone puzzle. Shotgun King runs about twenty minutes and The Ouroboros King longer, so those two want a proper sitting.
Can I play Really Bad Chess in a browser?
Yes. The SF Chronicle games page runs a daily browser version through Puzzmo, with a new board every day, and it is the closest you will get on a desktop without an emulator.
