Lots of News: Checkers Kingdom, 1.0 Pricing, and Patch 0.9.6

New Game: Checkers Kingdom

I'm officially announcing Checkers Kingdom! And good news for everyone here: Chess Kingdom players will get a discount when it releases.

Don't you worry though: 1.0 still comes first. I'm only announcing Checkers Kingdom now because Steam kind of demands you gather wishlists for at least a while before you launch. Consider this the heads-up; all my focus stays on finishing Chess Kingdom 1.0.

Pricing: A Small 1.0 Price Increase

Before we get to the patch, a quick note: I'll be increasing the 1.0 price a little bit, right before 1.0 comes out. So not yet, but that does mean right now is the most affordable Chess Kingdom will ever be.

1.0 is packing tons of new content: more countries, more AI opponents, two new game modes, and a whole UI overhaul. That alone is a reason for a small bump.

But more importantly: on Steam, you sell more than 90% of your units on sale. That's just the reality of the platform. So I have to increase the price a little to make sure I actually make at least a little money from the game.

Small jump, not a huge one. Just enough to make the math work.

So if you've been thinking about grabbing a copy for a friend, or picking it up yourself: now's the time. Early Access pricing sticks around until 1.0.And Now: The Patch

As always, keep the feedback coming and I'll keep updating!

Version 0.9.6: Grandmaster Openings

April 22, 2026

New: Grandmaster Opening Book

The AI now plays from a real tournament book built from 25,822 grandmaster games (2500+ Elo, 18 months of master play).

• 12,407 book positions / 28,041 move entries, 12.8× larger than the previous hand-curated book

• Natural depth scaling by difficulty: beginners see 1–4 ply, master/legend see up to 30 plies of prep

• First-move variety now matches real GM practice. e4, d4, Nf3 and c4 all appear in realistic proportions (no more knight-opening every game)

• Opening pools also rewritten and ~10× larger:

  • Casual: e4 / d4 / Nf3 / c4 all at ~25%, ~245 lines total

  • Normal & Hard: e4 / d4 / Nf3 split evenly, 320+ and 240 lines

  • Master: e4 / d4 only, 50/50, matching real GM practice

New: Country — Austria

12 new pieces in light & dark variants:

• King: Habsburg Emperor · Queen: Empress Sisi

• Bishop: Archbishop · Knight: Lipizzaner

• Rook: Schönbrunn Palace · Pawn: Imperial Guard

Austrian flag wired up across profile, league, tournament, and online play.

New: Save Versioning & Migration

Saves are now versioned so future updates can safely change the save format:

• Automatic pre-migration backups (last 5 kept per slot)

• Forward-compat. Newer-version saves load with a warning instead of crashing

Improved: Controller Support

• Controller support was not perfect after the UI update, now it's back to the standard you can expect.

Bug Fixes

• AI no longer favors Nf3 / knight-first openings. Root-caused in both the opening-pools selector and the book-probe path

• Multiple additional bug fixes across menus, gameplay and AI behavior

• General stability and performance improvements

Under the Hood

• 1001/1001 automated tests passing, with 44 new ones added for this patch

• New engine validation harness to catch AI regressions before they ship

• Master opening book sourced from 18 months of top-level tournament play

Heads up: this patch has a lot of AI changes. If anything feels off, report it and I'll keep tuning. That's what Early Access is for!

Thank you all so much for playing. I hope you'll love Checkers Kingdom just as much as Chess Kingdom.

See you on the board.