Jason Rohrer is microdosing chess

Jason Rohrer posted new hand-made pixel art for Chessamphetamine: board tiles and pieces drawn to the 32-color Sheltzy palette, headed for Steam.

Rohrer describes the game as "a lightning-fast roguelike deckbuilding auto-battler" that "puts the Chess back in auto chess," and the full Steam title carries a Russian subtitle—ДОФАМИН-МАШИНА ИЗ СССР, a dopamine machine from the USSR—which reads to me like a designer labeling the slot machine before you put your money in. It is billed as the first of a new series Rohrer calls MICRODOSE: games that are "Tiny, Cheap, and Deep." As manifestos go, three words is very Rohrer.

This is the person whose work Killscreen has covered since our first year—the pre-game interview ran in 2010—and whose personal games later got their own museum retrospective. The argument that a game could be one small, sharp, personal idea largely enters the culture through Passage. Watching that same designer hand-place pixels for a chess variant, at an audience size most studios would consider a rounding error, is the argument still being made.

The chess-variant corner of the archive is deeper than you would think—we once covered Chesh, which reinvented chess for the people—and Chessamphetamine looks like the fastest thing ever filed there. No release date yet; the wishlist button works today.