Omnichess: Chess Variants

Introduction

Omnichess lets players design and play their own chess variants — square, hexagonal or triangular boards, custom piece rules, alternate win conditions, and 2-8 player games against AI or friends. Developed and published by Omnimind, it launched on Steam on 12 July 2022 at NZ$71.49. Four years later, it has attracted just 8 total reviews, split evenly between positive and negative — this review read every one of them.

A claim worth checking directly

The most serious individual claim in this tiny sample comes from a reviewer who reports the game "no longer loads," describing it as "appears to be shut down," and adding: "the discussions board and reviews appear to be scrubbed at one point. This is honestly super suspicious." A second reviewer, independently and with 76 hours logged — a real sign of past engagement rather than a drive-by complaint — reports the same simple failure: "it will not load."

This review checked Omnimind's own public update history rather than taking either the shutdown claim or its absence on faith, and found something that directly contradicts it: substantial, continued development well past those reviews, including bug-fix and performance releases through October 2024 and a "complete re-design" labelled version 3, published as recently as June 2025. That's not consistent with an abandoned or shut-down project. This review cannot explain what specifically caused those two reviewers' load failures, and can't independently verify the "scrubbed" claim about the discussion boards either way — but the update history is public, current, and substantial enough that "shut down" does not appear to be an accurate description of the game's status as of this review.

An unusual price and monetisation structure

Separate from the shutdown question, this review found a genuinely unusual detail worth explaining plainly: Omnichess's own store description notes that "all purchases of Omnichess Steam Edition now come with a free Lifetime Subscription," unlocking all in-game items. That phrasing implies the game exists elsewhere (likely mobile) under a subscription or microtransaction model, with the Steam edition's one-time NZ$71.49 price buying an exemption from it. One reviewer's review, edited after the fact, confirms this history directly: "Warning!!!, this game has microtransactions and paywalls... Edit: the microtransactions have reduced, this improved significantly but it's still not worth buying." That's a genuinely unusual structure for a paid Steam release, and worth understanding clearly rather than assuming a standard one-time purchase.

Real, if smaller, technical complaints

Beyond pricing and the shutdown question, this small sample reports concrete functional problems: one reviewer says they were unable to create and play a custom variant with friends — a core advertised feature — calling the game "buggy." Performance draws a separate complaint: "It makes my computer lag despite it being a fairly recent Ryzen 7 system," with the same reviewer speculating the underlying Electron-based engine is part of the cause and expressing hope for a lighter-weight community alternative. A further reviewer reports the AI stalling excessively in asymmetric strategic situations.

Verdict

Omnichess has a genuinely creative, flexible core idea that clearly delights the players who got it working smoothly, and this review's check of the developer's own update history found real, sustained investment contradicting one reviewer's specific claim that the project has been abandoned. But an unusually high price tied to a subscription-adjacent monetisation structure, plus real reported bugs and performance complaints even on modern hardware, make this a hard recommendation at full price from a sample this small. Worth watching for a steep discount rather than buying blind.