2. Keep an eye on the entire Chezzboard.
3. Obtain and wear the Commander Crown.
4. Upgrade your Chezz pieces in this order: Pawns, Queens, Knights, Rooks.
5. Only move your pieces short distances.
Bottom Line Up Front: If you want to improve your Chezz game, it would behoove you to incorporate the above five tactics into your strategy. They are the ones that I used to rank among the top one percent of Chezz players in the world, on all four of my Chezz accounts. My player names are Lord Vaughan, AUSXmasCarol, XMasCarolUS, and Infidel.
For those of you who don't know, Chezz is a form of Chess without being required to wait your turn. It's a free, online game which has been downloaded more than one hundred thousand times from the Google Play Store, and has a user rating of better than four out of five Stars. It has two single-player, offline modes, as well as three online modes. Chezz has plenty of bots to play against in online mode.
By the way, you don't need to be a Grandmaster of Chess to do well at this game. My E.L.O. rating for Chess is around 1300 - a "beginner," even though I've been playing Chess for almost fifty years. Chezz also comes with a tutorial for those of you who don't even know how to play Chess (let alone Chezz) yet.
I recommend playing Chezz alone, because playing Chezz requires concentration, and the slightest distraction can cost you a game, and perhaps a dozen points on your ranking. I don't know the exact formula for the Chezz application's ranking system, but I have learned from experience that you lose more points per loss than you gain per win.
An application that I recommend for use in conjunction with Chezz, is Game Launcher. This facilitates turning off all notifications during game play, and recording video of your games.
I lose less often than I win, but when I do lose, it's usually because I'm distracted, or neglect to keep an eye on the entire Chezzboard. It's often tempting to focus on capturing or avoiding certain pieces while neglecting your King.
Although Chezz is based, primarily, on the rules and movements used in Chess, it does have significant differences. One such difference is the choice of Crowns your King can wear. You start out with the Gold Crown - "your regular crown." As you work your way through the offline, Adventure mode, you can earn other crowns, which include the Commander Crown, the Horseman Crown, and, finally, the Mad King Crown.
The Commander's Crown allows you to "order" your pieces to move or attack about a second in advance, so you can quickly order more than one piece to move at a time. The down side to this is that, as far as I know, there's no way to rescind these orders. Even if there were, there would rarely (if ever) be enough time to do so.
After moving a piece, a timer appears on it, counting down the tenths of a second until it "cools down" and becomes available to move again. This "cool down" time of each piece can be upgraded in the Upgrades section of the game, as well as the speed of each piece, as upgrades become available. You can assign and reassign upgrades whenever you want, but you are limited to the number of upgrades in your possession. Upgrades are awarded as you increase your Level - not to be confused with your Ranking. Unfortunately, as far as I know, it is impossible to obtain enough upgrades to upgrade all of your pieces with all possible upgrades. None of my Bishops have any upgrades; my Rooks have only two. The maximum number of upgrades is twenty; each piece, except the King, can be upgraded six times - three for speed, and three for cool down time. Five times six equals thirty, so it's up to each player to decide which ten upgrades are the least important.
Personally, I recommend upgrading Pawns first, because, since there are usually eight of them, upgrading them is usually tantamount to eight upgrades.
I say "usually," because Chezz is played on a variety of boards with various sets of pieces. In the offline Training mode, the board always looks like a normal Chess board, with the pieces set up as they would be for a normal game of Chess. In Adventure mode, however, and Online, unusual boards with unusual obstacles and set-ups appear. In Adventure mode, you can choose the board you like, as long as you have beaten all of the previous boards, except the Chess tutorial, which may be skipped. Online, the boards and setups are generated at random. Obstacles include holes into which any piece that attempts to pass over them disappears, and fires which consume the first piece to land on or pass over them. Sets include various numbers of pieces, sometimes placed in unusual starting arrangements. One board has Kings surrounded by Knights, but no other pieces.
Another reason I upgrade my Pawns first, is the potential element of surprise. Opponents tend to under-estimate them. I often win Chezz games without ever moving anything except my Pawns - often, without the necessity of promoting them to Queens.
Queens are my next choice for upgrades, of course, and I enjoy seeing how many of my Pawns I can get promoted before delivering my coup de grâce. By the way, Pawns who reach the farthest rank are automatically promoted to Queens; you don't get to decide if you'd rather Knight them.
Because of the Kings and Knights only table I mentioned above, I would upgrade my Knights next.
Finally, I upgrade my Rooks' "cool down" with my last two, available upgrades. I do this because Chezz bots' tend to attack them in their corners with Bishops and Queens, and it's very satisfying to simply move them aside, "cool down," and "hunt" these "hunters."
Which brings me back to the last of my top five Chezz tactics: Only move your pieces short distances.
Perhaps the biggest mistake I see my opponents make is attacking my pieces with pieces from long distances. Because I don't have to wait my turn to move my pieces in Chezz, I, often, move them out of harm's way by the time the attacking pieces reach their previous locations.
This is particularly vital with regard to the King, which takes me back to what I consider the third most important Chezz tactic: Obtain and wear the Commander Crown.
The Mad King's Crown causes the King wearing it to be able to move like another, RANDOM piece, such as a Knight or Queen, the next time it's moved. I place as much emphasis on the word "RANDOM" as I do, because this is crucial when planning exit strategies. While this crown provides an element of surprise, I feel it is out-weighed by the inability to predict what moves will be available to my King after I move him, if he's wearing the Mad King Crown.
A tactic I use when playing against a Mad King, is to always assume that he can move like a Queen or a Knight, avoiding the places he could move if he were a Queen or a Knight, unless I have another, good reason to move one of my pieces within their range.
The Horseman Crown is also, in my humble opinion, a bad choice, because it causes the King who wears it to only be able to move like a Knight. Moving like a Knight is ideal for an expendable Knight who can be upgraded to move and "cool down" quickly. It is unthinkable for the invaluable King, whose speed and "cool down" times are slow, and can not be upgraded. I have discovered that it is impossible for a King with the Horseman Crown to prevent a King with a Golden or a Commander Crown from killing him. Often, for sheer entertainment value, when I find my opponent's King wearing the Horseman Crown - I kill every piece he has, move the rest of my pieces to the edges of the board, and hunt him down with only my King.
Another tactic involving the King is an invaluable move that I've discovered, which I call "the bait and switch." This is a very dangerous move, but, if executed with skill and precision, is, as I've said, invaluable. When enemy pieces cross paths at the same time, the piece which was in motion first usually stops where it encounters an enemy piece, which is killed. This comes in handy if you don't have time to move your King out of the way of an attacking piece, but you do have time to intercept the attacking piece with another piece.
However, it is also possible for the King to switch places with an attacker at the last moment. When an attacking piece is adjacent to the King, the King can be moved one place in the direction of the oncoming attacker.
It is safer, of course, to simply move the King in another direction, or intercept the attacking piece with another piece, but this trick is a good one to keep in mind, especially when the King is in a corner, with a piece in front and beside him, and a Queen or Bishop coming after him on the diagonal.
When moving the King out of harm's way, it's important to land on a place the attacking piece isn't able to move to, because the King will almost certainly not be able to move out of harm's way if the attacking piece attacks again. The other option is to kill the attacking piece with another piece before it "cools down."
It's also important to keep an eye on the entire board throughout the game, in case your opponent has a piece or pieces lying in wait on your King's escape routes.
I should also inform you, the reader, that Castling is possible in Chezz, but only when the random board and set-up are "normal." To do this, once all the normal requirements for Castling are met, tap on your King, and an animated circle will appear on the Rook or Rooks which is/are available for Castling; tap on the Rook, and the King will Castle on the side of the Rook you tap.
I suspect that capturing en passant is possible in Chezz, but I've never seen it done. And, as I've proven with four Chezz accounts, it isn't a tactic needed to become not only a Chezzmaster, but one of the top one per cent of the Chezz players in the world!
Article by William Mortensen Vaughan
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