For a time when I was in middle school I was a member of the Chess Club, and while that didn’t really bring me the fame and adulation that I really wanted, I did have the chance to play a kind of interesting video game version of our chosen pastime.
Battle Chess is actually a pretty humdrum interpretation of the ubiquitous board game. So there’s really nothing to say there. The thing that makes this stand out is the battling. See, in normal mundane Chess you capture a piece and just gets taken off the board. But in Battle Chess the pieces actually fight it out (to the death, even) and the winner captures the square. Not that the battles have any actual bearing on the results or anything. It’s just a silly way to make the game a little more exciting. Well, as exciting as playing Chess on a computer in the early 90s could be, I guess.
I only played Battle Chess one time after school during a Chess Club meeting. And I didn’t even get to finish my match because I had to leave the meeting early. But what I did play I thought to be reasonably entertaining. Mostly because I was never really that good at Chess, but I got to see characters representing my little Chess-guys get brutalized in the name of a fun after-school activity, and that’s a hard thing to accomplish any more.