BOT.VINNIK Chess Masters Academy · published
Hello everyone!
Two pieces of news today. The first one is the big one: BOT.VINNIK Chess Masters Academy releases on December 8. The second is that the demo you played during Next Fest just got its largest update since June, and it is live now.
This game closes a project that started in 2020 with BOT.vinnik Chess: Combination Lessons. Nine games later, we took everything we learned in those six years and built the academy from the ground up as a single course, with the lessons ordered so that each one prepares you for the next, instead of a collection of separate topics. One more thing that matters to me: every lesson in it was written by hand by my co-founder, and every puzzle was either composed or hand-picked by him, one at a time, the way a chess book gets written. The grumpy robot is the teacher, but there is a person behind every page.
Thank you for playing the demo, taking part in the playtests, leaving reviews, posting in the forums, and reporting bugs. A lot of what is in this update came straight from those reports.
Chess Basics is complete, with 11 chapters. The three new ones cover en passant, pawn promotion, and castling.
Tactics 1 to 7: 63 chapters and 418 puzzles in the base game. The demo covers the first module; the other six are now visible on the map as a preview.
Versus mode: full games against Laika or against BOT.VINNIK, three difficulties each. Beating BOT.VINNIK on hard has its own ending.
Challenge mode: a 30-puzzle run per scenario, drawn from a bank of 3,262 puzzles.
Steam leaderboards (overall and challenge) and 67 achievements.
Here is a look at the two modes that are not in the demo.
Both DLCs release on the same day as the game and work the same way: each historical game becomes a chapter where you play the decisive moves, with BOT.VINNIK commenting move by move and the key squares highlighted on the board.
Soviet Championships: 48 games from the USSR Championships in three modules (Early, Mid-Century and Late), 150 lessons. Botvinnik, Tal, Spassky, Karpov and the others who went through that tournament.
Special Matches: 48 games from outside the championships, in three modules: Prodigies, Legendary Queens (from Vera Menchik onward), and USSR vs the World (the 1970 match and its protagonists). 177 lessons, including 14 "What if?" lines where BOT.VINNIK steers away from what was actually played, you refute the idea, and the board snaps back to the historical game.
A chapter from the Soviet Championships DLC: Tal vs Klaman, 1957.
A "What if?" line from the Special Matches DLC.
The demo is now version 0.9.0. These are the changes you will notice first; the smaller fixes are in the build too.
Save and resume mid-chapter. Quit in the middle of a lesson and you come back to exactly where you were: same board, same pending move, same hint on screen, same streak. Before this, quitting and coming back could give you back full points, which was not fair to anyone who stayed.
The whole academy map. Modules 2 to 7 now have their final icons and sit on the map, stamped DEMO. The map opens on the last module you visited, chip titles got an LED display, and the circuit lines light up only when something unlocks.
Pawn promotion done right. The piece you pick is now part of the answer, so promoting to the wrong piece counts as a mistake. The pawn walks to the last rank before the panel opens.
King in check now pulses red, including when you resume a lesson.
Lesson endings. Lessons that end in checkmate or double check now close properly, with the right sound and score. Some of them were ending one move early.
Scoring. The per-move cap is fixed (100 points, 200 on a streak), an old double-hint bonus that should not exist was removed, and the XP total on the map now adds up every chapter, with a small animation when you come back from one.
Laika has 50 new lines for wrong moves, and she no longer floats out of place when you resume or play with the black pieces.
Text and layout fixes in all 12 languages. Broken characters are repaired, chapter names are consistent, chess terms follow one glossary (based on Lichess terms), and every lesson text now fits its speech bubble, including in Large Text mode.
The voice command crash from Next Fest is fixed. Voice only loads when you turn it on in the options, a corrupted voice model repairs itself, and folder names with accents or non-Latin characters no longer freeze the game. No microphone, no problem.
If you have the demo installed, Steam will update it on its own. If you ran into the voice crash in June and gave up, this is a good time to try again.
If you have not wishlisted the game yet, now is the moment. It is the single thing that helps us most on launch day.
Thank you for your support!
Rodrigo
Deep Green Games