After 18 years of beating roguelikes, I think I've finally found my kryptonite

I won't claim to be a tactical genius, but when it comes to roguelikes, I've played more than my fair share. These days it doesn't usually take me long to mash enough synergies together to get my first few wins in pretty much any example you chuck my way.

Today though… I have met my nemesis. I am absolutely terrible at Gambonanza. It's embarrassing.

On the face of it, it's a very simple game. Each round, I'm able to deploy a small number of chess pieces on a little board (initially just three), and my goal is just to capture all the enemy pieces before losing all of mine. All the pieces simply move as they do in chess—so a pawn, for example, can only move forward one and capture diagonally forward one, a bishop can move or capture anywhere in a diagonal line, and so on.

In practice, that makes every round a tight puzzle. Bearing in mind every potentially threatened square while manoeuvring your own pieces into the right positions to capture the enemy without then leaving themselves vulnerable to counter-attack—it's enough to wrap my brain in knots.

And I can't afford to be sloppy about it, either. Gambonanza effectively has permadeath: every piece of mine that is captured is gone forever. I can get randomised replacements from the shop between rounds but it's costly, and one bad round is often enough to put me in a hole that I struggle to dig my way out of.

Normally, this is where I'd turn to cheap synergies to save my bacon, but I don't even know where to start in this game. I can try and stack my bench with particular pieces with selective shopping between rounds, but with a concept this abstract, it's hard to know what will be most effective. Is a board full of knights a good strategy? If so, how do I build around it?

The next layer is gambits I can buy to give myself permanent bonuses—this is where the roguelike skullduggery comes in, in theory, with things like earning free pawns whenever your queen is in check, or making bishops also able to move like kings. I can see the rough shape of how some of these things might come together into game-breaking combos, given time, but surviving long enough to get there, that's another question entirely.

Whenever I do manage to muddle through a few rounds, my reward is to face one of Gambonanza's surprisingly eldritch bosses, who in addition to freaking me out with their disturbing appearances each impose their own special power to make things even harder. That includes effects like making squares of the board fall away into the void, or not being able to see their deployment during the planning stage. Even worse, they often have elite pieces, with properties such as being uncapturable until they're the only one left.

It's at this point that my resolve usually starts to crumble entirely (along with a few squares of the board). This is simplicity wielded expertly as a weapon, creating intricate tactical puzzles out of straightforward, 1,500 year old rules, and I have to applaud its cleverness. If only I was anywhere near clever enough to stand up to it.

Now, this is the point where you all go try it and then come back and tell me it's actually a breeze and I'm a fool. The good news is, you can have that pleasure completely free: Gambonanza has a demo on Steam that you can play ahead of its full release on May 1 this year.