Games Like Shotgun King, Sorted by What You Liked
The lists you already found are answering a different question
Updated August 2026.
Search for games like Shotgun King and the results file it under “chess software”. AlternativeTo’s Shotgun King page opens its recommendation list with Lichess and Chess.com (checked August 2026). Both are chess clients. Shotgun King is a twenty-minute run in which you control exactly one piece, shoot the other side with a blunderbuss, and hand the enemy army a free upgrade every floor. Nobody who just finished a Shotgun King run wants Lichess next.
The other problem with that AlternativeTo list is that it treats Shotgun King as one thing. It is four things stacked on top of each other, and different people fell for different ones. So this list is sorted by which of the four you actually liked.
What Shotgun King is doing, mechanically
You play the black king, alone, after your entire army defects. The Steam page spells out the loop: each turn you either move the king or fire the shotgun, and firing costs you your next move as a reload. Survive the floor, kill the white king, and you pick between two random pairs of upgrades. Each pair contains one buff for you and one buff for the white army. PUNKCAKE Delicieux put the run length on the store page as roughly twenty minutes.
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.
Four separate hooks sit inside that loop: the lopsided rules, the single piece you push around, the run that ends in one sitting, and the draft that charges you for your own power. Whichever one held you decides what to buy next. The wider genre is covered in our chess roguelike roundup.
The short answer
Buy Pawnbarian. It is the only game on this list that keeps all four hooks at once: one hero piece, chess movement, runs measured in minutes, and upgrades drafted mid-run. Everything below is the better pick if you know which single hook you came for.
| What you liked in Shotgun King | Play this next | The one reason |
|---|---|---|
| The asymmetry: outnumbered, and the enemy shows you its turn in advance | Into the Breach | Every turn is triage, and the win condition is buildings left standing |
| Controlling exactly one piece | Pawnbarian | Your whole deck is movement options for a single hero |
| A run that ends in one sitting | Slice & Dice | Lose one fight and the run is over, so a session is short by design |
| The draft that arms your enemy too | Gambonanza | Rule-bending upgrades pile up until the board itself is the problem |
| Chess pieces with the chess removed | Chessformer | Pieces obey gravity and the enemy king refuses to move |
If what you liked was the asymmetry
Into the Breach
Verdict: the best pick if the appeal was being permanently outnumbered and solving the board as a puzzle instead of a fight. Three mechs, a compact grid, an alien swarm that telegraphs every attack one turn ahead, and a win condition measured in buildings left standing. It is the least chess-shaped game here and the most Shotgun-King-shaped in feel, because both games are really about surviving a turn you cannot win outright. Steam page.
Chessformer
The lopsidedness runs the other way here. You have the pieces, the enemy king never moves, and none of your pieces are ever captured. What you can do is drop them, because every piece falls after it moves and stacks on whatever is below it. Verdict: buy it if the asymmetry itself was the joy and you want to sit with a fixed puzzle at your own pace. It has no run structure at all, so treat it as a palate cleanser between Shotgun King attempts. Steam page.
If what you liked was running a single piece
Pawnbarian
A single hero on a small dungeon board, with a hand of cards that each move it like a different chess piece: play the knight card and you jump like a knight. Monsters have their own tricks and the board is tight enough that one wrong move is fatal. The developer, j4nw, lists runs at fifteen to thirty minutes on the store page and states outright that there are no permanent unlocks, so a lost run costs you the fifteen minutes and nothing else. Verdict: the closest thing to Shotgun King in existence, and the one I would hand to someone who says “I want that again”. Steam page. I went deeper on it in games like Pawnbarian.
Usurper
Your king is a unit you shove up the board, and cards drop new pieces around it, so everything you do routes through one piece standing somewhere dangerous. Verdict: take this one if you liked the king being both your weapon and your liability, and you want a deck attached to it. The Steam page counts four factions and thirteen bosses, plus gambits that let a deck do something it should not. The review sample is small enough that I would watch footage before buying and treat the score as provisional. Steam page.
If what you liked was the length
Slice & Dice
Five heroes, each with their own dice, twenty levels of monsters, and a rule that a single lost fight sends you back to the start. Every turn is a small rerolling puzzle, and you can undo actions freely inside a turn, which keeps the brutality in the strategy and out of misclicks. Verdict: the pick if what you wanted was the short, sharp, one-mistake-ends-it rhythm, on a board of dice instead of a chessboard. It has no chess in it at all, so skip it if the pieces were the point. Steam page.
Gambonanza
Chess on a tiny board where you have to capture every enemy piece, king included, under a move budget that makes the floor crumble if you spend it badly. The store page counts more than 150 gambits that change the rules of the run, and about ten minutes in they have usually stopped resembling chess. Verdict: buy it for the snack-sized runs and the escalating rule chaos. Steam page.
If what you liked was the upgrade draft
Passant: A Chess Roguelike
Matches of chess where the rules are the loot. You collect pieces that do not exist in chess (Archbishop, Dragon Knight, Dragon King), items that freeze or demote an enemy piece, and badges that twist the whole ruleset into things like Atomic Chess or Zombie Pawns. Verdict: the right call if you liked watching the rulebook deform run by run and you still want real chess underneath it. It is Windows only. Steam page.
The Ouroboros King
You assemble an army from classic and fairy pieces, hang relics on them, and then discover the catch: you move one piece per turn while the enemy army does not have that problem. Verdict: the deepest army-building option here, and the pick if the draft mattered to you more than the solitude. Lose and you continue on another timeline with a different map. Steam page.
Chess: The Lost Pieces
A deckbuilder made out of chess pieces in the literal sense: you start with a rook, a knight and a bishop, and recruit from a pool of over thirty invented pieces, including a rook that drags pieces toward it and a queen that captures whoever captures her. Verdict: worth it if piece design is the part you enjoy. The review sample is tiny, and the art and UI look a generation behind everything else on this list; I could live with that, you might not. Steam page.
Where the numbers land
All Steam figures below checked August 2026, US store, regular price rather than any live discount.
| Game | Price (USD) | Steam review score | Reviews | Released |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate (reference) | $9.99 | Very Positive (91.0%) | 7,403 | 2022 |
| Pawnbarian | $9.99 | Very Positive (89.0%) | 894 | 2021 |
| Into the Breach | $14.99 | Very Positive (94.2%) | 22,204 | 2018 |
| Chessformer | $4.99 | Very Positive (99.7%) | 321 | 2022 |
| Usurper | $9.99 | Mostly Positive (79.2%) | 48 | 2024 |
| Slice & Dice | $8.99 | Overwhelmingly Positive (96.9%) | 2,561 | 2024 |
| Gambonanza | $14.99 | Mostly Positive (75.6%) | 1,613 | 2026 |
| Passant: A Chess Roguelike | $11.99 | Mostly Positive (79.9%) | 369 | 2025 |
| The Ouroboros King | $9.99 | Very Positive (80.3%) | 569 | 2023 |
| Chess: The Lost Pieces | $7.99 | Mostly Positive (72.7%) | 22 | 2023 |
| Hellmate (ours, in development) | Not set | No reviews yet | None | 19 January 2027 |
Two of these have review counts small enough to be noise: Usurper and Chess: The Lost Pieces. A percentage over that few reviews can swing several points on a bad week, so read them as “a handful of people liked it” and nothing firmer.
One more, still unreleased
Our own Hellmate sits next to this list rather than on it. It is roguelike deckbuilding chess set in the seven floors of Hell, where every floor belongs to a deadly sin and each sin crowns its own king. You summon pieces and cast spells out of one mana pool, brand your army with sigils, and have to melt the king’s HP before your turns run out. Soul Coins and permanent upgrades carry over between runs. It is unreleased, so nothing here has been tested outside the studio.
Quick answers
Is Pawnbarian the closest game to Shotgun King?
Yes. The piece of Shotgun King it does not carry over is the enemy draft: nothing in Pawnbarian hands the monsters a buff because you took one.
Are there other games where you upgrade your enemy as well as yourself?
No, nothing I have found copies the paired draft where every upgrade you take also arms the other side. The nearest is Gambonanza, where rule-bending gambits pile up until the board turns hostile on its own.
Do I need to know chess to play these?
No. Pawnbarian teaches piece movement in minutes and Into the Breach uses no chess at all. If chess itself is the barrier, our list of chess games for people bad at chess is built around that problem.
Which one is cheapest?
Chessformer, at $4.99 on the US store (regular price, checked August 2026). It is also the shortest commitment here, since it is a fixed set of puzzles you can dip into for ten minutes.
