I have never been particularly good at The Game of Kings, but I do love when an indie developer turns their talents to turning chess into something more funky. Shotgun King stole my heart a few years ago, and now Rulehouse is looking to offer its own spin on the classic.
Weird Weekend is our regular Saturday column where we celebrate PC gaming oddities: peculiar games, strange bits of trivia, forgotten history. Pop back every weekend to find out what Jeremy, Josh, Ted, and Rick have become obsessed with this time, whether it's the canon height of Thief's Garrett or that time someone in the Vatican pirated Football Manager.
In a generous demo covering the first act of the game, Rulehouse presents a Wario Ware spin on things—in multiple ways. Each level introduces at least one new mechanic or modifier you have to keep track of, starting with the basic "pawns only, first one to the other side of the board wins," and ramping up to a simulated prison break where guards are firing on your pieces, and you have to get your king—here the game's protagonist in a prison jumpsuit—to the exit.
The escalation in complexity had me genuinely scratching my head, stumped at how to proceed at a few points. Rulehouse eschews trad chess pieces as much as possible, only introducing bishops and kings by the very end of the demo—and stubbornly insisting on calling knights "cows" along the way.
Instead, you get stuff like "ice pawns" that shatter on taking an opponent's piece, or "poison pawns" that bring down the opponent's piece with them when they're captured. I'm also quite fond of the upside-down pawns that move on a diagonal, and capture pieces directly in front of them.
Not every new piece is represented on each subsequent level, but it feels like Rulehouse is building a library of modifiers and complications to draw from in the final game, like how the enemy variety in a classic-style FPS campaign ramps up as you go on. It impressed me that Rulehouse could tease such novel puzzles out of one of the most studied and "solved" games to ever exist, and if it can sustain this pace of surprise and delight across a full game, I think it will prove a worthwhile puzzler.
Take me back
The biggest surprise of all, though, was its presentation and sense of humor. You need something special and specific to stand out with retro pixel art these days, and Rulehouse nails the sound, look, and vibe of the Game Boy Advance. It's got the vibrant, saturated colors I associate with that special little handheld, and all the UI elements are just a little too big, like they're meant to appear on a much lower-resolution screen.
One of my favorite flourishes is how Rulehouse pairs very crisp and clean bits of pixel art with super bitcrushed and noisy backgrounds, often sourced from real photography. It's a technique that was frequently deployed on the GBA, and in addition to pure nostalgia "hey, remember this?" appeal, it adds a uniquely early aughts surreality to the proceedings, the kind I associate with stuff like Wario Ware or, less intentionally, all those really boo-boo, memory-holed movie tie-ins and ill-advised home console ports to the GBA.
The music, similarly, nails a specific sensibility, a kind of synthy funk I associate with Wario Ware, Earthbound or, more recently, Balatro. Rulehouse is a love letter to the Game Boy Advance from people who thoroughly, obsessively, get the console.
Rulehouse is also genuinely funny. Its narrative bits have a strong rate of Smiles Per Minute™, and that dovetails nicely with the surprise rule changes and offbeat art to result in something that's just kinda nice. Rulehouse is aiming to launch some time in 2027, and for now, you can wishlist it or check out the demo for yourself on Steam.
