LEGO Chess, unsurprisingly, is just Chess with a bit of Lego flavoring. In my opinion though, it’s pretty well done, and I quite enjoyed my time. This game was unbelievably hard to get running on a modern PC, taking a combined 12 HOURS. I spent 12 hours to play LEGO Chess. Now I want to preface this by saying, I don’t know SHIT about how to play chess. Please forgive me. I am sorry. Anyways, let’s get to the menus before the actual game, because I think they’re notable enough to warrant speaking on.

Upon entering the game and choosing or creating our profile, we get met with the King. He was actually included as a minifigure in some copies of the game. The main menu itself is more of an interactive room, which I quite like. Different parts of this room lead to different menus, such as the chessboard itself being a quick match, or the book which leads to a series of tutorials. At the bottom left of the room there are these craft supplies which lead to a scrapbook, and this is shows the game's 100% condition.

It’s pretty easy, you just fill a grid in which each square is a different cutscene to unlock, with a different one being shown for one type of piece taking out another, such as pawn on pawn or pawn on bishop. If you turn the page, you can also see that there are two different themes, one being Western and the other being Pirates. The only other thing you have to do to 100% LEGO Chess is the “story” mode.

It’s really not a story mode, it’s just 3 matches against increasingly difficult CPUs, before going to the next theme. After finding this strange, I decided to do a bit of research and found that this game had a pretty rushed development, and one of these side effects was the lack of the story part of story mode. I found someone on YouTube who did some digging around the files of their disc, and apparently there were supposed to be cutscenes before and after matches in the story mode, which would be different depending on if you won or lost the match. They had this for each of the 3 levels for both themes, meaning 6 full cutscenes that were left unused.

Speaking of cutscenes, there are a combined 120 unique cutscenes, 60 for each theme. Although, half of these are literally just texture swaps between models depending on what team captures who, so we can safely half it to 60 total.

Onto the actual gameplay itself, it’s pretty cozy to be honest. I don't know, just something about the charm of these figures, the sound effects, and the style of the cutscenes just works, which I really wasn’t expecting in such an early Lego title. There also is indeed background music, which is actually pretty chill and I quite liked it. Now, when I started playing this game, I was getting unbelievably frustrated, and trust me, you’ll understand why.

Multiple times throughout the game, seemingly completely randomly, I would just, poof. Crash. No clue how, no clue why, nothing. After a few times this happened mid-game, it would get to the point I couldn’t even open up a story game without crashing before even getting into it. A bit of research later though, and apparently Lego Chess looks for the A drive on your computer when you’re playing, which I didn’t have as an available drive letter. I assigned a hard drive to it, but it doesn’t seem to actually write anything to it, which greatly confuses me as to why it’s needed in the first place. You would think the crashes are fixed now, and to be fair, I could get into the game now, but that wasn’t the end of it. The crashes were less frequent, but would still happen consistently in the middle of games. After quite a bit of troubleshooting, I finally found a method to fix these crashes, at least in my experience. The PCGamingWiki recommended installing and using Direct3D drivers, which has a higher color depth, higher screen resolution, and overall would make it look better than the default driver. However, once I changed to the default software driver, I stopped getting crashes.

I’m not gonna lie, this “story” mode got really annoying. In the quick match settings, you can set the CPU difficulty from 1 to 99, and in story mode the 3 CPUs are at 25, 50, and 75 difficulty respectively. And to be frank, the last CPU is quite the bitch. There were sometimes when I would just restart immediately from an early capture because I’m an idiot and am not that good at thinking a move or two ahead, but most of the time my games would end because of this stupid ass thing called a stalemate. This happened mostly when I captured all of the CPUs pieces except for the King, so it would end up being a bit of a goose chase with the King himself. After a few moves though, boom, stalemate. No legal moves can be made according to the game. But as a chess novice, I don’t know what the fuck that means?? From MY Point of View, there’s a LOT of legal moves I could make, like hmm MOVING THE PAWN FORWARD A SPACE? THAT'S LEGAL ISN’T IT??? So yeah, very frustrating. That’s not all though. This didn’t happen once, twice, or three times, but more times then I could even bother to count. Like I said, I’m a chess novice, I don’t know how this works, so this was FRUSTRATING. HOURS of time wasted because of this stupid mechanic, which I later decided to research, and listen to how stupid this is. “Stalemate is a kind of draw that happens when one side has NO legal moves to make. If the king is NOT in check, but no piece can be moved without putting the king in check, then the game will end with a stalemate draw!” LIKE WHAT??? WHY NOT JUST GIVE ME THE CHECKMATE VICTORY AT THAT POINT???? Absolute bullshit in my opinion.

Small additional thing, there was this one move where I would see the rook and the king switch spots, and I had no clue what the hell this was. Apparently it’s called castling, and nobody really knows why it was added to chess. Why it isn’t excluded from play considering how strange of a move it is, I have no clue, and I couldn’t even figure out how to do it in-game, so yeah, I’m salty. So salty in fact, that I actually got stuck on this last CPU. I don't think it was because I'm really that bad at chess, but sometimes it just gets to the point where you get so annoyed you start playing really braindead just hoping you'll win a game, but that just was not happening. It was getting to the point I was considering giving up on the story mode considering the only 100% condition was getting all the cutscenes which I could do in quick play, but it just didn't feel right in my eyes. So after some contemplation I decided to hit the books and go to the tutorial mode. Yeah, it was to the point I figured I should actually take my time and improve at chess rather than brute forcing my say through it.

So, at first I thought going to the tutorials would be a good idea, but it turns out you gotta start at the very very beginning, meaning i had to spend close to AN HOUR learning the very very basics. I'm not gonna lie, it didn't take too long for the braindead playing to set in, mostly because this king just does. not. stop. TALKING. In it's defense though, it is definitely aimed at a very young audience, so it does make sense that I'd be incredibly bored by it. I just wish these tutorials weren't required for the 100%.

So, for some context, in each of these lessons, learning the pawns for example, you will get a record depending on how well you do. If you get zero mistakes, you get a platinum record (like vinyl record). I originally thought this was just a dinky little dopamine device to make kids feel good about themselves, but nope, not only are you told what record you get, but that bitch is framed on the wall. It took quite a few days of procrastinating, and I finally got through the first of 3 books required, giving me a gold crown. What I did not know at this time was that platinum crowns existed for zero mistakes, but more on that in a second. Surprisingly, the second book actually had some useful information. I didn't know what the hell an en passant was, but I do now, and I can't say the same about any of the previous lessons, so good on you LEGO Chess. One thing I immediately noticed was this second book only has 4 lessons, compared to the first book's 16. Thank christ. After completing the second book, I managed to get a platinum crown. Now as previously mentioned, I did not know this platinum crown existed at the time, and this was very very frustrating, as that meant I had to go back to the first book to upgrade my gold crown to a platinum. Luckily I found a video online of someone getting the platinum crown on youtube, so I just copied what he did, as that checks and checkmates lesson is super annoying.

At least that's what I thought I'd do, until I found out that in the practice boards they do where they're like "get however many checks or checkmates here", those boards are randomized, so I was on my own for some of them. Thankfully I got through it, but that also meant book 3 would probably be similar. I also saw that there was one comment on the video saying how in the Hebrew version of the game, the King was even more animated than in the English version, which I did’t even wanna imagine, but had to look up.
Afterwards, the third book also only had 4 lessons, which was a relief to say the least after all I went through, and I breezed through it after taking a day break. So, while the tutorials weren’t as tedious as I thought they’d be thanks to the length of the last two books, I still had to complete the story mode and all of the pirate theme cutscenes, which seemed like they’d be tedious considering how I got stuck last time, but I actually found a checkmate trick that the AI falls for nearly every single time, in only like 3 moves. After beating the story mode, I got the rest of the cutscenes by playing quick matches and setting the difficulty to 0, making this a pretty easy ending overall.

One thing I forgot to mention was in the quick match, there is another theme technically, simply resembling traditional chess pieces. You can also make it so one theme goes against another, but sadly there are no cutscenes in this mode. In their defense, they already made over 50, cut them some slack.

When playing the game itself, there is an option to change from 3D mode to a more traditional 2D mode, but I never chose 2D, and I don’t think many people did either. They’re all just traditional pieces in the 2D mode, and obviously that means you don’t get the charm of the unique assets in the 3D board. Something I found neat for the time was there was actually an option to play a network game with another player in the main menu. I never ended up trying this because imagine how complicated that would be to setup in Windows 11 in 2023.
So yeah, that’s Lego Chess. There isn’t too much to talk about, but I quite enjoyed my time.