Mad Chess Beta 0.85 - Carbuncles, Kobolds & Mandrakes factions -

General

• Three new factions enter the madness ! Burrow underground with the Kobolds and emerge to inflict status effects on the enemies, or play with the sun/moon cycle of the Mandrakes to control the center of the board, or use the Carbuncles with their unusual move patterns and first-move bonus to mystify your opponent!

• New updated keywords: travel = non-capturing move, capture = capturing move, move = non-capturing or capturing move; meaning a pawn travels forward (1) but captures diagonally (1), and a queen moves surround (7).

• Updated all unit ability descriptions to be shorter and integrate the new keywords

• Time increments added to versus and multiplayer games (0, 3, 5 or 10 seconds)

• Change to chaos mode: now only randomizes units from any factions + adding 3 objects (does not shuffle the pieces in the back rank anymore)

• New shuffle mode: click on the shuffle option to shuffle your queen, knights and bishops with any army (also works with random and chaos)

• AddedChessboardsadded the sky board, made the marble board the default one and added a random board option for any versus/multiplayer game.

• Info menu added to the main screen: simple screen with additional information about the game

• Slightly increased AI power: the AI now understands better some abilities (including the goblins curse) and can go up to depth 5-6 (plys) in endgames with fewer units on the board

• Balance update to many units (many of these changes are to reflect the exclusive use of each faction's mechanics)

Balance update:

• AddedTenguNew ability for the Dojo (if under threat can leap move around the ally king)
• AddedDemonsAll new rune move patterns for Demons (all of their moves are either normal or leaping instead of travel + moves)
• AddedGeniesNew ability for Lamp (if on the edges of the board, can move slide along the edges by (1)), new ability for Djinn (can travel on the board as if it was horizontally cylindrical)
• AddedAngelsNew ability for Throne (becomes invincible on the last rank)
• AddedSecretNew ability for Limb (promotes on the 7th or 8th rank), new ability for Queen (promotes to Hand/Amazon when moving to the last rank with 150MP), Brain loses its old 150 MP that promotes all rooks into queens
• AddedTikisNew ability for the Totem (can switch form by travelling forward or backward by (1)) (forms are diagonal (4) or cross-split (1)), Tiki mole is gone and replaced with the Tiki Hog (enemies cannot travel and land on any adjacent square to it)
• AddedYetisNew ability for Tusk (can capture both an enemy and its defending pawn if in the same leap direction), buff to Igloo: the ability works for range 3-4

• Mermaids: Small buff to Spine (creates water squares underneath itself even without moving)

• AddedVampiresNew ability for Tomb (when capturing an ally ghoul, gains leaping moves for the rest of the game)

• Nagas: rework to Empress (it gets its surround (2) aura for the front pawn back, but once it survives one capture, it loses 1 surround range and becomes surround (3)

• AddedAliensNew ability to Scout (moving sideways triggers an instant but optional ally king travel)