Games Like The Ouroboros King, Sorted by What You Want
Which game is closest to The Ouroboros King
Updated August 2026.
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 Ouroboros King is the one in that shape that hands you a whole army to assemble.
If you want one name: Passant: A Chess Roguelike is the closest match on Steam right now, because it is the other game that keeps a full board, gives you strange new pieces to collect, and stacks rule-breaking items on top of them. Two runners-up cover the cases where Passant is wrong for you. Usurper rebuilds the same army fantasy out of a card deck. Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate keeps the run structure and strips the army out entirely.
Every Steam figure on this page, price, score, review count and release date, was checked in August 2026.
| Game | Released | Steam rating | Reviews | Regular price | What it keeps from Ouroboros King |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Ouroboros King | Feb 2023 | Very Positive, 80.3% | 569 | $9.99 | The baseline: army, relics, short runs |
| Passant: A Chess Roguelike | Aug 2025 | Mostly Positive, 79.9% | 369 | $11.99 | Full board, invented pieces, rule-twisting items |
| Usurper | Sep 2024 | Mostly Positive, 79.2% | 48 | $9.99 | Army building, but the army comes from a deck |
| Chess: The Lost Pieces | Jan 2023 | Mostly Positive, 72.7% | 22 | $7.99 | Collecting odd pieces as the whole progression |
| Gambonanza | May 2026 | Mostly Positive, 75.6% | 1613 | $14.99 | Relics and gadgets that break the rules |
| Shotgun King | May 2022 | Very Positive, 91.0% | 7403 | $9.99 | Run structure and escalating difficulty |
| Pawnbarian | Sep 2021 | Very Positive, 89.0% | 894 | $9.99 | Chess movement as a tight tactical puzzle |
| Chessarama | Dec 2023 | Very Positive, 87.8% | 180 | $14.99 | Reimagined goals for familiar piece movesets |
| StarVaders | Apr 2025 | Overwhelmingly Positive, 97.1% | 4321 | $24.99 | Build stacking on a grid, no chess |
| Into the Breach | Feb 2018 | Very Positive, 94.2% | 22204 | $14.99 | Perfect information, one move decides it |
| Gambetto | Jul 2026 | No user reviews | 0 | $4.99 | Chess plus cards, against a human |
The store page already gave you five of these
Before writing anything I read The Ouroboros King’s own Steam page, which ends with a line naming its inspirations: Shotgun King, Pawnbarian, Slay the Spire, Into the Breach, and 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel. The developer, Oriol Cosp Games, printed the recommendation list on the product page itself.
The store gave you those five names, so I only come back to them where they answer a specific piece you are missing. The rest of this page is sorted by which piece of The Ouroboros King you are trying to get back, and it leans on games that shipped after February 2023, which that inspiration line could not have included.
The four things you might be missing
The Ouroboros King does four separable things, and almost no other game does all four:
- An army you assemble. You field a full set of pieces against a full enemy set, and you can only move one of them per turn.
- Fairy chess pieces. What you collect is movement. Each new piece arrives with an invented move pattern of its own.
- Relics and consumable gadgets. The build comes from items layered onto the army.
- Short, unlocked runs. The store page puts runs at 15 to 45 minutes and states that all content is unlocked from the start.
Pick the number that mattered to you and skip the rest of this page.
If you want the army back
Passant: A Chess Roguelike
Passant is the only game I found that keeps the army, the invented pieces and the rule-bending items in one package, and that is why it is the recommendation. You play real chess matches up a ladder of increasing difficulty, but the board fills with pieces like the Archbishop, the Dragon Knight and the Dragon King, and badges rewrite the rules of the whole match: Atomic Chess, reflecting bishops, zombie pawns. Items let you freeze a piece, demote one to a pawn, or promote your own. It sits at 79.9% positive from 369 reviews against The Ouroboros King’s 80.3% from 569, so the two scores are effectively identical. Our Passant guide takes the game apart in more detail.
Usurper
Usurper hands you the army one card at a time. You play cards from a deck to drop units onto the board, push your King forward to play cards on the front line, stockpile Power to afford a Queen or a Cannon, and checkmate the opponent. Four factions, thirteen bosses, ten difficulty levels. The caveat is scale: 48 reviews at 79.2% positive is a very small sample. The deck half of this has its own name, which we define in what is a chess deckbuilder.
Chess: The Lost Pieces
Chess: The Lost Pieces makes collecting odd pieces the entire progression, which is item 2 on the list above. Its 30-plus pieces include a pawn that has to charge before it moves, a rook that pulls distant pieces toward it, and a knight that gets more mobile the longer it survives on the board. You start with a rook, a knight and a bishop and build a full army deck through a randomised story mode. It has 22 reviews at 72.7% positive, the lowest score on this page. That is thin enough that I would not spend $7.99 on it without watching footage first. It is here because nothing else fills this slot.
If you want the rule-breaking build back
Gambonanza
Gambonanza goes hardest on relics of anything here, and it rewrites the goal of the match to make room for them. The win condition moves off the king entirely: you have to capture every piece on the board, and if you waste too many moves the board crumbles underneath you. You spend money between fights on over 150 Gambits that alter the rules of the run, plus board tiles and pieces, then fight bosses. It launched in May 2026 and sits at 75.6% positive from 1613 reviews, so go in expecting a game still finding its balance. The board is smaller and the runs are snackier than Ouroboros King’s.
Chessarama
Chessarama is a puzzle box: eight chess-inspired games that keep the established movesets and swap out the goals and themes. It carries 100-plus puzzle levels, daily and weekly challenges, and 24 collectible chess figures. There are no runs and no build here. At 87.8% positive from 180 reviews it lands well as the puzzle box it claims to be.
If you want the run but not the army
Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate
Shotgun King inverts the Ouroboros King premise: your army has defected and you are alone with a shotgun. Each turn you either move your king or fire, then move again to reload, and after every floor you pick one upgrade for yourself paired with one for the enemy side. Runs are around 20 minutes, there are 20 ranks of difficulty, and it holds 91.0% positive from 7403 reviews, the best score of any game here that still uses chess pieces. If you want to know what to play after it, we ranked its closest relatives.
Pawnbarian
Pawnbarian is the tightest tactical puzzle here: one hero, a hand of chess-piece cards, a small dungeon board. Each card moves your single hero the way that piece moves, and every monster on the board has its own trick. Runs are 15 to 30 minutes across 6 characters and 3 dungeons, and it sits at 89.0% positive from 894 reviews. Its store page lists “no permanent upgrades” under a heading called Not Features, so the difficulty curve lives entirely in your own play.
If chess was never really the point
StarVaders
StarVaders is the one to take if what you actually liked was watching relics stack into something broken. You pilot a mech on a grid against an alien invasion, build a deck, and rewind time to undo a bad turn. It is the best reviewed game on this page at 97.1% positive from 4321 reviews, and it is also the most expensive at $24.99. There are no chess pieces anywhere in it.
Into the Breach
Into the Breach gives you perfect information: every enemy telegraphs its attack before you move, so each turn is a puzzle with a correct answer. That is the mental posture a chess position asks for, and at 22204 reviews and 94.2% positive it is the most tested game on this page.
Gambetto
Gambetto is a fast card duel against another person. Movement cards reposition your pieces on a compact chess-inspired battlefield, faction decks supply the combos, and private lobbies can run custom rule sets. It released on 23 July 2026, and its Steam record still lists no single-player mode and no user reviews at all. Treat it as a lead to watch.
Where our own game sits
Our own game, Hellmate, sits beside this list rather than on it, and it is unreleased, so there is nothing measured to point at yet. It is a chess deckbuilder whose kings carry health bars: you spend mana to summon pieces and cast spells across the seven floors of Hell, and each floor’s king has to be melted down before your turns run out.
Quick answers
Is Passant a good replacement for The Ouroboros King? Yes, it is the closest one on Steam. It is the only other game on this page that keeps a full chess board, collectible pieces with invented movement, and items that rewrite the rules mid-match.
Is there a chess roguelike where you control a whole army? Yes, four of them. Passant, Usurper, Chess: The Lost Pieces and Gambonanza all put a full set of pieces under your command, while Shotgun King and Pawnbarian give you a single unit.
Which of these has the strongest Steam reception? StarVaders, at 97.1% positive from 4321 user reviews. Among the games that actually use chess pieces, Shotgun King leads at 91.0% from 7403 reviews.
Is The Ouroboros King still worth buying first? Yes, if you have not played it. Nothing on this page does all four of its parts at once, and at $9.99 it is cheaper than five of the ten alternatives listed above.
