Chess purists, look away. PC Gamer has been playing Rulehouse, a puzzle game whose take on the royal game — dubbed "Pawn Chess" — jettisons most of chess's rules and replaces them with what the outlet memorably describes as weapons-grade Game Boy Advance energy.

The pitch, per PC Gamer, is that Pawn Chess "is whatever you want it to be" — a chess variant where the 1,500-year-old ruleset is treated as a suggestion rather than scripture. The result lands somewhere between a board game and a toybox, with the GBA-flavored presentation doing a lot of the charm offensive.

It slots into a small but reliable tradition of games that get mileage out of breaking chess: once you stop treating the rules as fixed, the board becomes a puzzle sandbox instead of a thousand-year-old institution. PC Gamer's verdict amounts to an endorsement of the premise itself — chess is immediately more fun, the outlet argues, once most of it has been thrown overboard.