Eric Barone's been playing lots of chess and reckons Elon Musk's 'tech tree' idea isn't awful: 'What if someone did a Balatro treatment… a chess roguelike?'

PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon recently sat down with Stardew Valley creator Eric Barone to discuss everything from Jojamart to his next game, Haunted Chocolatier. One question was what Barone himself is playing, and the man is as old school as it comes.

"Well recently I've been playing chess which is a great game," says Barone. "It's one of the original games, it's very deep, it's a really good game in terms of game design. It is unfortunate that AI has kind of broken it in a way.

"I was kind of depressed about that for a bit, but now I'm over it and I feel like who cares? I'm not interested in AI playing chess, I'm interested in humans playing chess. But I'm not like a huge chess guy, it's just always been something that I've wanted to be decent at. So I've been doing that lately."

Barone goes on to discuss a few other games, which we'll circle back to because he later returns to chess, prompted by Elon Musk's rather bananas assertion last year that chess is bad because, among other things, it lacks fog of war.

"I mean, a lot of chess grandmasters have criticized classical chess throughout the years," says Barone, "because it does end up [where] you just have to remember all the theory, the openings, and it ends up being, 'Oh, did you remember this line 27 moves in or not?' And you only remember it 26 moves in, so gotcha.

"So that's why someone like Magnus Carlsen, he's playing freestyle chess, they call it now, which is where they randomize the pieces, essentially. So basically there's 960 different variants [of starting position]. So it's not really feasible that you're going to remember openings for 960 different variants. So you have to just play real chess. You have to think about tactics. And I feel like that might be more of an interesting game, actually."

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Freestyle chess, also called Chess960, was invented by the American grandmaster and world champion Bobby Fischer, one of the most brilliant players that chess has ever seen, and was borne of exactly the frustrations Barone talks about. If you had a misspent youth memorising openings and theory, it's a truly refreshing way to play the game, and is becoming increasingly popular as chess itself morphs into a more fast-paced online spectacle.

But what about Musk's wilder ideas? Does chess need a tech tree?

"I don't know about that, but I actually think it could be interesting," says Barone. "I was actually thinking because I was playing chess race, and thought, what if someone did a Balatro treatment to chess, like where you're basically playing a chess roguelike? I feel like that could be interesting. And sure enough, there is someone making such a game. I think it's called Passant or something like that."

I'm not sure what variant Barone's referring to as "chess race", possibly this board game, though it might also be the Racing Kings variant of the game. Passant: A Chess Roguelike does indeed try out some of these ideas: it's not out yet, but there is a demo, and players seem to dig it.

As for what else Barone's playing, he's spending time with some other classics.

"I've also been playing WarCraft 3 Reforged," says Barone. "A little bit of the campaign, and I've actually been playing custom maps with my friend, we play random custom games, which feels very old school.

"That's what I did in high school a lot with Warcraft 2 and Age of Empires, especially Age of Kings. I played a ton of Age of Kings when I was in high school and would just go to my friend's house, we'd have LAN parties and that was so fun. I feel like real time strategy needs to come back, you know? I don't know if you feel like [that], kind of no-one plays those games anymore."