ButtChess+1

ButtChess+1 is essentially like checkers or draughts, but for three players. It’s produced by a little indie company called RalBru. It’s got a kind of very rough-and-ready charm to it, and luckily, the game itself is good. The general idea is that you have to get three of your pieces from your side to the other side, and it works well as a three-player game because you have this kind of balance where if you go too much on the attack against one player, you risk getting taken out – and meanwhile, if two are having a bit of a battle, the third player can sneak the win.

The game comes with orange, green, and purple pieces and a standard board inside the box.

The pieces themselves are relatively well-made. They are injection-moulded plastic and, while not the best quality, they’re fairly satisfying. Overall, the game has a very simplistic look to it, which works well to a certain extent with an abstract strategy game like this, but if this is going to be something that’s widely successful, they could probably do with hiring a graphic designer to spruce it up a bit.

Now, the game comes with these extra boards that can be used to build different shaped boards in jigsaw patterns. The issue is that when the company designed the box, they made it just that little bit too small to actually fit the jigsaw pieces in. I can see what they did – they designed the jigsaw pieces to be the size of the outside dimensions of the box and not the inside, meaning the pieces don’t fit in the box.

Now, when you do order ButtChess+1 off the website, you do actually get given these extra pieces separately – but not being able to store them inside the box is, to be honest, really irritating. Especially when, like me, you have a lot of games – I know these are going to go missing.

To be honest, I’d rather they reprinted the boxes and charged me a bit extra, or at least sold bigger boxes on their website.

I think the general board works really well and some of the other layouts are quite fun. The problem is that if you create a pinch point, it’s very easy to just play defensively and end up in a situation where it’s a stalemate, because none of you is going to win. There’s no way to force your opponents to do anything, as there is in some other similar strategy games, and that can lead to a bit of a problem.

When Jack and I played, we had one game where we used the very narrow, middle-focused Japanese board. We attacked each other and were clearly doing damage, but it reached a point where it just fizzled out.

Don’t get me wrong – I actually really like ButtChess+1, and it was one of the games that, while I was walking around the UK Games Expo, I recommended people buy. But since getting it home and playing it a bit more, and noticing these fairly sizable flaws, along with the irritation of not being able to fit everything back in the box, ButtChess+1 is now a bit harder to recommend. The shine has faded slightly.

Strategy fans, there’s definitely something here, but maybe wait for a second revision, if there is one.