Ghost Chess — A Midnight Duel

The smallest soul can fell a king.

Thirty-six graves. Two restless armies. Turn the unknown into your next move in Ghost Chess — A Midnight Duel, a compact PICO-8 strategy game inspired by Tomb Chess.

Raise an army of ghosts, charioteers, headless knights, mummies, serpent queens and cloaked kings. You command red; the computer commands green. Every grave might reveal a friend—or the thing that will eat it.

Choose your opponent

• Easy — a gentler, fallible opponent for learning the graveyard.
• Normal — tactical replies and short-range search.
• Hard — deeper search, capture analysis and careful endgame play.

The AI plays fair: it knows which pieces remain, but cannot see underneath sealed graves.

How to play

1. Click or tap any grave to reveal a piece. Revealing either colour uses your turn.
2. Select a red piece, then move one square up, down, left or right. There are no diagonal moves or jumps.
3. Higher ranks capture equal or lower ranks. A Ghost (1) can capture a King (6), and a King cannot capture a Ghost.
4. Eliminate the green army to win. A side with no legal action loses. After 25 consecutive turns without a capture, the duel is a draw; reveals count as turns.

Ranks: Ghost → Chariot → Headless → Mummy → Serpent → King. Each army begins with 6 / 4 / 3 / 2 / 2 / 1 of these pieces.

Controls

Mouse / touch: click or tap graves, pieces and highlighted destinations. Keyboard: arrow keys aim, Z / Enter acts, X cancels or opens the menu. Click the game first to focus it. Music and SFX have separate toggles. Your duel saves automatically after each turn; choose Continue when you return in the same browser.

Inside the cartridge

Original 16-colour pixel art, animated reveals and captures, nine sound effects, a four-pattern graveyard soundtrack, an in-game field guide, three AI difficulties and a complete single-player duel—all on a 128 × 128 PICO-8 screen.

Free to play in your browser. A macOS download and PICO-8 cartridge are also included. The Mac build is Intel x86_64 and needs Rosetta 2 on Apple Silicon. It is locally ad-hoc signed, not Apple notarized; macOS may require you to approve opening it. The browser version needs no installation.

Inspired by Tomb Chess. This is an independent recreation with newly created assets, not an official port. Built with PICO-8 by Lexaloffle. Code, pixel art, tracker audio and text were created with AI assistance.