Fantasy Checkers

Genre: Board Game

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Local Alternating)

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: Prison Games

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Review:

(Note: This game is included in Checkers Quest Bundle, along with Checkers For Kids)

Fantasy Checkers is a version of the classic family-friendly Board Game released on Nintendo Switch in 2021. As for the “fantasy” part, this game has a vaguely medieval theme to its visuals, and pieces that are selected are highlighted with a sparkly glow. So… that’s fantasy, I suppose.

The presentation here is decent, using nice, colorful 3D graphics. It’s nothing special, but it looks nice enough. This is backed by nice but forgettable acoustic guitar music.

As for the gameplay, players are given their choice of four different national variants of checkers, as well as roughly a half-dozen “locations” to act as the checkerboard. They choose whether to play against an AI opponent or in 2-player mode (either with two controllers or using one controller to pass-and-play). And… that’s it. No online play, no score or leaderboards, no AI difficulty settings, nothing. The game does have decent touchscreen controls in handheld mode, but that’s about the only extra feature you’ll get here.

For $8, Fantasy Checkers is a fairly feature-poor version of Checkers. Aside from optional touchscreen controls and a few gameplay variants, there’s not much of anything here. But if you’re looking for an inexpensive game of Checkers, this game will do the trick, especially if you get it on sale (and if you’re going that route, get the Checkers Quest Bundle instead, since it includes both this and another game and regularly drops to $2).

tl;dr – Fantasy Checkers is a nice-looking but somewhat feature-poor version of the family-friendly Board Game. Wait for it to go on sale if you want a decent but unspectacular budget version of Checkers.

Grade: C

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