There’s a moment in Gambonanza, maybe an hour or so in, where you stop thinking about chess at all. You’re not worried about bishops or knights or any of that. You’re staring at a crumbling 5×5 board, your queen is threatened, three tiles have already fallen into the void because you spent too long deliberating, and you’re frantically trying to remember which Gambit it was that gave you extra pawns when things went wrong. It’s chaos. Brilliant, completely absorbing chaos.
Gambonanza comes from solo developer Blukulélé, published by Sidekick Publishing and Stray Fawn Studio, and the elevator pitch is essentially: what if Balatro, but chess? You start each run rolling for three pieces on a slot machine, place them on a tiny board, and then go about capturing every single one of your opponent’s pieces. Not just the king. All of them. It’s a small but crucial twist that changes the entire texture of how you think about the board, and it works a treat.
In between matches sits the shop, where you spend your winnings on more pieces, upgraded tiles, and most importantly, Gambits. There are over 150 of these, each one bending a rule in some daft or devastating direction. Some force enemies to skip turns. Some supercharge specific pieces. Some make pawns promote the moment they get near a king. The combinations you stumble into are what make each run feel distinct, and stumble is the right word; half the fun is discovering something accidentally brilliant. It’s a proper it’s-chess-but-not-chess-em-up (it’ll catch on).
Every five matches you get a boss fight, and Blukulélé has had a lot of fun here. The bosses are exaggerated chess grandmaster parodies, the kind of thing you’d find scrawled in a margin, and they hit hard. The board itself is an enemy too. Stall for too long between captures and tiles start crumbling beneath your pieces, which is an elegant way of punishing passive play and keeping things snappy.
The AI can be a bit inconsistent, mind. There are moments where an opponent plays a sharp, punishing move that makes you sit back in your chair, and others where they do something so inexplicably bad you wonder if they’ve forgotten what game they’re in. It can occasionally make a late run feel like it’s been decided more by fortune than skill, and that’s a touch frustrating when you’ve carefully assembled something wonderful.
But here’s the thing: it barely matters. Gambonanza is the kind of game where you lose a run, immediately think “right, this time I’m going knights only,” and you’re back in the slot machine screen before you’ve even registered starting a new one. The loop is tight, the matches are short enough that nothing overstays its welcome, and the sheer variety of Gambits means you’re always chasing the next ridiculous synergy.
You don’t need to know chess, either. The UI tells you where any piece can move, friend or foe, which makes it genuinely accessible without dumbing anything down. People who do know their chess theory will find extra texture in it. People who don’t will be fine. It’s smart design.
Gambonanza is a proper little gem. Addictive, inventive, and very hard to put down.
Reviewed on PC
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