King-Dom

King-Dom is an online chess game for two players, played across an edgeless landscape called Kingland. You can choose traditional chess on a flat board or enhanced chess in a procedurally generated landscape, where you build board squares, claim territory, collect resources and buy reinforcements.

Landscapes and game types

Traditional Chess disables the enhanced options and uses flat terrain. Enhanced games can use one of three landscape sizes: Standard, with a 64 × 64 board; Big, with a 128 × 128 board; or Massive, with a 256 × 256 board. Landscapes can be generally flat, undulatingly hilly or toweringly mountainous. One million seed numbers combine with the nine size-and-terrain combinations to produce 9 million landscape permutations; the game also includes one million very similar Chess boards.

You can start a game on a procedurally generated Landscape or on a Kingland saved in the editor. The game includes the pre-saved “000000” Chess, Standard and Big landscapes. You can save either type of game and load it later; both players’ machines save the current state when a player saves. Either player can request a draw, which is declared if both agree.

Build and claim territory

In enhanced games, Rooks can build board squares across empty landscape. One Rook can make a straight path, while two Rooks placed at opposite corners can fill a rectangle of up to 32 × 32 squares. A Rook can build only once per move. The new squares mark territory with silver or gold, which the opponent’s pieces cannot use except when a Knight makes a double move. Building may also reveal goodies from Kingland.

A King can enter one of your Rooks by moving onto its board square, and can leave when you attempt to move the Rook one square diagonally. A Rook carrying a King cannot build board squares. Knights can make a double move, combining two standard moves.

Resources and combat

You collect silver Koins worth 500 K and gold Koins worth 1,000 K. During your turn, you can spend them in the shop on reinforcement pieces, placing a purchased piece on an empty board square next to your King. Purchased pawns move one square in any direction and can capture an opponent’s piece only by moving diagonally.

You can toss bombs onto empty board squares. A bomb’s blast reduces the energy of pieces within three squares by one quarter, and throwing from higher ground toward lower ground lets it travel over more squares. Pieces also lose a small amount of energy as they move: 1/200 per square. Cheese replenishes energy by one quarter when a piece consumes it; you can also drop cheese on the starting square of your next move for another piece to collect.

Kingland editor

The Kingland Konstruction Kit lets you make and edit landscapes, adding or removing board squares, paths and rectangular areas, and placing objects such as trees and rocks. Its landscape tools can create random hills or valleys, adjust hill height and radius and water height, and change landscape textures and colours. You can load, save and upload Kinglands to the Steam Workshop; uploads require equal numbers of pieces for both players and exactly one King each.