Coming soon

About This Demo

What this game is

Pocket Pawns is a chess role-playing game about collecting chess pieces. You walk through towns and along roads. Wild chess pieces live along the way, and each one challenges you to a checkmate puzzle. Solve the puzzle and the piece joins your team. You then use your team to play real chess matches against the characters you meet.

What you get in this free demo

• Two towns and the roads between them: Openfield in the meadows and Frostford in the snow, plus the icy road heading east.
  
• The first Club Master: a full chess match against the master of Frostford. Win it and you earn the Frost Sigil, the first of six badges in the game, and the road east opens.
  
• 60 chess lessons at the town university, starting from "this is a pawn" and going up to rook endgames. Free to take, and never timed.
  
• 9 complete stories told by the people who live in these towns. A few stories continue in the full game, and the demo tells you when that is the case.
  
• Wild pieces to catch: the meadow and ice pieces. Each one is a real checkmate puzzle, and the piece defends itself while you solve it.
  
• Two giant chess boards on the road that block your way until you checkmate the king standing on them.
  
• The Puzzle Explorer: 250 checked checkmate puzzles you can play at any time from the title screen.
  
• Four of the six difficulty settings, from Pawnling (for people who have never played chess) up to Master.
  
• Ten languages, full controller support, and the Field Guide: an illustrated handbook inside the game that explains everything above.

Your progress carries over

The demo saves your game the same way the full game does. Every lesson you finish, every piece you catch and the Sigil you win stay with you. The full game continues from exactly where the demo ends. Nothing is lost.

What the full game adds

Seven more towns, the other five Club Masters and their Sigils, 272 pieces to collect, 589 chess boards, 202 lessons, 39 stories, the Chessino (a casino built inside a volcano that plays for chips, never money) and the World Championship. If you enjoy the demo, wishlist the full game and Steam will tell you the moment it is out.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Pocket Pawns was made with the help of generative AI, and the game's own credits name every tool used.

Images and music: the chess piece art was generated with ChatGPT, the board art with Gemini, and the world and environment art from assets created with Nano Banana Pro alongside free-to-use CC0 packs found online. The soundtrack is from Suno.

Claude wrote the game's code, its writing, and its translations into ten languages — and made much of what you see and hear directly in code rather than from an image generator: the character pixel art, the in-world props and interface, the three-dimensional rooms, the animation, and the sound effects.

The chess itself is not generated. The puzzles come from the Lichess puzzle database, released under CC0, and your opponent is Stockfish, a classical open-source chess engine. Real positions, a real engine.

Nothing is generated while you play. Pocket Pawns creates no content at runtime and never connects to an AI service. It does not need an internet connection to play.