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STRATEGY
Shotgun King Review: I Can't Believe Chess Made Me Angry Again After All These Years
I've been playing chess since I was eight years old, and I thought I'd seen every possible way to ruin it. Then PUNKCAKE Délicieux handed the Black King a shotgun and somehow made chess stressful again.
Paul
February 25, 2026
8.3
Overall Score
"Shotgun King has no business being this good."
The Part Where I Realized I'd Been Conned Into Playing Chess
Listen. I know what you're thinking because I thought it too: this is a gimmick. Some indie dev slapped a gun onto chess pieces and called it innovation. I loaded up Shotgun King fully prepared to write 800 words about how we've officially run out of ideas. Then I played it for five hours straight and had to confront the uncomfortable reality that sometimes gimmicks transcend their gimmickry. The premise is absurd on paper. You're the Black King. Your entire army has abandoned you. You have a shotgun. The White army still has all sixteen pieces moving by traditional chess rules, and your job is to murder every last one of them before they checkmate you. It's like if John Wick was a chess piece, except John Wick had better odds. What makes this work—and I'm genuinely annoyed that it works—is how perfectly the shotgun integrates with chess logic. You still move one square at a time like a king. The shotgun has range and spread. Suddenly positional play matters in completely new ways.
How PUNKCAKE Délicieux Made Turn-Based Combat Feel Dangerous Again
The genius move here is making this a roguelite. Between runs, you choose card-based upgrades that modify both your abilities and the enemy's strength. Maybe your shotgun gains range. Maybe white pieces get an extra knight. Every decision is a careful balance between power and escalating difficulty, and it creates this beautiful tension where you're constantly negotiating with yourself about how greedy to get. The white pieces follow actual chess movement rules, which means you're essentially playing against a full chess AI that wants you dead while you're running around with a firearm. Pawns march forward. Knights do their obnoxious L-shape jumps. Bishops slide diagonally. The difference is now you can just shoot them, assuming you can survive long enough to line up the shot. I've played plenty of chess variants over thirty years—I've suffered through 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel, for god's sake—but this is the first one that made me genuinely rethink positional strategy. Cover matters now. Corners are death traps. Open boards are terrifying.
The Aesthetic Choice That Actually Enhances Gameplay
PUNKCAKE Délicieux does this minimalist pixel art style that I normally associate with asset-flip garbage, but here it serves a purpose. The board is clear. The pieces are instantly readable. There's zero visual noise obscuring what's happening, which matters when you're trying to calculate whether that bishop can reach you in two moves while you're lining up a shot on the queen. The sound design deserves special mention because whoever decided the shotgun blast needed to sound this meaty understood the assignment. Every successful hit has weight. The little pfft sound when you miss is perfectly calibrated to make you feel like an idiot. The sparse soundtrack doesn't overstay its welcome. Look, I have strong opinions about indie games that mistake 'minimalist' for 'unfinished.' This isn't that. This is intentional design that prioritizes function, and the result is a game where you never lose because you couldn't see what was happening. You lose because you made bad decisions, which is somehow worse but infinitely more fair.
Where the Cracks Show Through the Checkered Board
The difficulty scaling can get sadistic fast. Some card combinations create unwinnable scenarios, and you won't know until you're five floors deep and suddenly facing three queens with your peashooter shotgun. The roguelite progression means some runs are just doomed from the draft, and while that's par for the genre, it still stings when you waste twenty minutes discovering your build was dead on arrival. Late-game runs also tend to blur together once you've seen all the card combinations. The core innovation carries the experience far, but after your fifteenth successful run, you start to feel the edges of the content. PUNKCAKE clearly prioritized depth over breadth, which I respect, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't hungry for more variety in enemy behaviors or stage hazards. And occasionally—rarely, but it happens—the AI does something monumentally stupid that breaks immersion. A rook suicides into your shotgun when it had checkmate in two moves. These moments are infrequent enough that they don't ruin the experience, but they remind you that you're playing against code, not Kasparov.
The Moment Everything Clicked and I Stopped Being Annoyed
There's a specific run I had where I'd upgraded my shotgun to fire in a plus-sign pattern. I was cornered by two bishops and a knight, completely certain I was dead. Then I realized if I moved diagonally backward, the bishops would converge on my position, and I could blast all three pieces in one shot on the next turn. It worked. I felt like a genius. That's the magic trick Shotgun King pulls off repeatedly: it makes you feel clever for understanding both chess logic AND action game positioning simultaneously. The best runs feel like violent puzzles where you're threading needles between pieces that all want you dead. The worst runs end quickly when you miscalculate knight range and get forked like a novice. Either way, you immediately want to run it back and try a different strategy. This is what roguelites are supposed to do—create emergent moments where systems interact in surprising ways. Most indie roguelites fail at this. Shotgun King succeeds more often than it has any right to.
Rating Breakdown
Quality
8
Shockingly polished for a game built around weaponizing board game pieces—zero bugs, zero crashes, just pure murderous chess logic.
Innovation
9
I genuinely haven't seen anything like this since someone first thought to add battle royale to Tetris, except this actually works.
Value
9
Free or dirt cheap depending on where you grab it, and I've lost more hours to this than games I paid sixty dollars for.
Gameplay
8
The core loop kept me playing until 2 AM on a work night, which I'm still furious about.
Audio/Visual
7
Minimalist pixel art that knows exactly what it's doing, paired with sound effects that make blasting a rook feel unreasonably satisfying.
Replayability
9
Roguelite progression means every run feels different, and I keep coming back despite swearing I'm done.
What Didn't Annoy Me
Genuinely novel concept that actually justifies its premise instead of being pure gimmick
Roguelite structure creates real replayability with meaningful build variety
Difficulty progression is brutal but fair—when you die, it's because you screwed up
Presentation is clean and functional with zero artistic pretension getting in the way
The shotgun feedback is unreasonably satisfying for a pixel art chess game
Free or absurdly cheap depending on platform, which is borderline charity for this quality level
What Made Me Sigh
Some card combinations create unwinnable runs that waste your time
Late-game content variety runs thin after you've exhausted the card pool
Occasional AI brainfarts break the illusion that you're fighting a competent opponent
Difficulty spikes can feel arbitrary when the draft screws you over
No tutorial to speak of—you learn by dying repeatedly, which works but isn't elegant
Final Verdict
Shotgun King has no business being this good. It's a one-joke premise executed with such mechanical precision that the joke becomes legitimate game design innovation. PUNKCAKE Délicieux understood something fundamental: constraints breed creativity. By limiting you to one piece with one weapon, they created a strategy game that feels genuinely tense in a way traditional chess hasn't felt since I was a teenager learning fool's mate. If you have any affection for chess, roguelites, or games that respect your intelligence, play this. If you hate turn-based strategy, this won't convert you, but it might make you reconsider what's possible in the genre. I went in expecting to dunk on a gimmick and came out having played one of the smartest indie strategy games I've touched this year. I'm not happy about admitting that, but here we are.
Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate
Genre
Strategy
Developer
PUNKCAKE Délicieux
Platform
Windows, Mac, Linux
Release Date
Jan 1, 2022
Rating
8.3
/10
Tags
chess
roguelite
strategy
action
pixel-art
turn-based
shotgun
indie
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