Checkmate Gallery

TEN OPPONENTS. TEN GALLERIES. ONE CROWN. Checkmate Gallery is a single-player chess campaign. Ten opponents wait for you, each in a gallery built for them alone — a shadowed hall, a candlelit library, a stone chamber, an observatory beneath the stars. Defeat one, and the next opens. A REAL ENGINE, NOT A SCRIPT Every opponent is powered by Stockfish, one of the strongest chess engines in the world. There are no scripted openings that ignore your moves and no random blunders — every move comes from Stockfish's own real evaluation of the position. Easier rivals simply search less deeply and sometimes weight a genuine alternative over the single best move, so they miss things a stronger player would catch. The final two opponents, Duelist and Legend, play at Stockfish's own calibrated Elo strength with no adjustment at all. The climb is deliberate. Cadet looks only a couple of moves ahead. Grandmaster looks eight. Architect, Duelist and Legend are tuned in even steps beyond that. You will feel each rung. TEN RIVALS, TEN GALLERIES Cadet The Black Gallery Scholar The Library Warden Stone Hall Merchant Walnut Parlor Oracle The Observatory Regent Throne Room Grandmaster White Gallery Architect The Drafting Hall Duelist The Duel Chamber Legend Hall of Fame Each rival opens with real, named chess openings — the Italian Game, the Sicilian Najdorf, the Nimzo-Indian, the Ruy Lopez and more — so every campaign teaches you something about the board. REVIEW EVERY GAME When a match ends, Game Analysis replays it move by move. Stockfish evaluates each of your moves, shows what it would have played instead, and marks where the game turned. It runs only after the game is over, so it can never feed you hints mid-match. A SCORE THAT ACTUALLY MEANS SOMETHING Winning is not enough. Every victory is scored on three things at once: · the material you captured, · the pieces you managed to keep, · and how few moves it took. You cannot maximise all three. Hunting every last pawn costs you moves. Racing for a fast mate leaves material on the board. A brutal, careless win scores below a patient, clean one. The score is a judgement on how you won, not just that you won — and after every game a breakdown shows you exactly where each point came from. Only genuine victories are recorded. A loss or a draw earns nothing. TEN HALLS OF FAME, NOT ONE Every rival keeps its own Hall of Fame, and each one holds up to 1,000 ranked places. That is ten separate leaderboards and ten thousand places to claim. It also means a Cadet win is never measured against a Legend win. Each gallery is judged on its own terms, so there is something worth chasing at every step of the campaign — not just at the end. Beat your own best on Cadet while you are still learning, and come back for Legend when you are ready. Scores are saved on your PC and survive between sessions. After a win, you can also choose to publish your result to that rival's public online leaderboard — entirely optional, and nothing is sent anywhere unless you choose to publish it. BUILT TO BE PLAYED, NOT FOUGHT · Save and resume your campaign at any point. · Separate music and sound-effect volume. · Brightness, contrast and window-mode controls. · Two anti-aliasing levels. · Selectable piece styles. · Runs on ordinary hardware — no high-end graphics card required. Original music by the developer. Move and capture sounds recorded on a real wooden board. Checkmate Gallery is a complete single-player game, fully playable offline. There is no account requirement, and nothing is uploaded unless you choose to publish a result to the optional online Hall of Fame.