The Duke

On your turn you do exactly one of two things: pull a random tile from your bag and place it on a square adjacent to your Duke, or pick up one of your tiles already on the board and execute the movement pattern shown on its currently-face-up side. After the action, you flip the tile - so a piece that just performed an aggressive slide now shows a defensive jump, and vice versa. The hand-feel is that of chess pieces that rewrite their own movement card every time they move, with a satisfying physical flip after each action.

Setup: each player places their Duke and two Footmen in the back rank. Turn: either summon (draw a tile from the bag and place adjacent to the Duke) or move (activate a tile, follow its pattern, capture if you land on an enemy tile, then flip the tile). Capturing the enemy Duke wins. There are no rounds, no phases, no scoring track - it is a chess-cousin played to checkmate. The two-state tile gives every piece a cadence: aggressive face leads to defensive face leads back to aggressive, so threats and vulnerabilities oscillate as you act.

Each turn the choice is small in count (typically 4-12 legal tile activations plus the summon option) but rich in branching, because flipping a tile changes the entire threat map two ply ahead. The core tradeoff is tempo versus development: every move you make to attack also rewires that piece's defense, and every summon spends a turn not attacking. Bag randomness on summons adds a controlled luck element - you might pull the Knight you needed or the Bowman you didn't, and adapting your line to the tile that arrives is the game's signature challenge. Good moves are hard to spot because the board state two turns from now depends on which faces of which tiles will be up.

Dominant skill: spatial planning and forward search, exactly as in chess - reading threats, planning forks, defending the Duke. The twist is that each piece's movement changes after use, so pattern recognition across two-state movement libraries matters more than rote opening theory. Secondary: risk modeling on the bag draw (when is the tempo cost of summoning worth the expected value of a random tile?). Almost no hand management, no memory load beyond the tile faces, no mental arithmetic. Strong players visualize the post-flip board the way chess players visualize a candidate move's reply.

Play chess with shapeshifting pieces. Every move rewrites the piece's powers, and no two games begin with the same army.

Wooden tiles with crisp black movement diagrams etched on each face, in the visual language of chess problem diagrams rather than illustrated fantasy. Heraldic medieval styling on tile names and box, but the play surface is austere and functional - readability over flavor. No notable illustrator; the design language is the diagram itself.