Play Shotgun King on PC Play Shotgun King on PC and Mac

About the Game

What happens when chess loses all its rules and gains a firearm? Shotgun King is what happens. Developed by Plug In Digital, this game strips away everything familiar about the classic board game and rebuilds it as a tense, roguelike survival experience with a single dark premise: your entire black army has switched sides, and you, the Black King, are left standing alone on the board with a shotgun in hand and absolutely nothing left to lose.
The setup sounds absurd, but the gameplay is surprisingly deep. Every turn you face a choice. You can move your king to a new square, or you can fire your shotgun at an enemy piece to remove it from the board. The catch is that firing costs you your reload, meaning you must move again before you can shoot a second time. This back-and-forth rhythm creates a constant tension between positioning and aggression. Move too cautiously and the white army will corner you. Fire too recklessly and you will leave yourself exposed with an empty chamber and no escape.
Clearing a floor means hunting down the enemy king before checkmate catches up with you. Once a floor is cleared, the game shifts into its roguelike layer. You are offered two random card combinations, each bundling together one upgrade for your side and one upgrade for the white pieces. This is where Shotgun King gets genuinely strategic in a way that goes beyond the board. Every benefit you take comes at a cost, and learning which trade-offs you can survive with is a big part of what makes runs feel so different each time.
Here is what the game offers across its full content:
Fifteen difficulty ranks that scale the challenge steadily as you improve
An ever-expanding card pool with unlockable options that change how runs play out
More than 100 achievements covering a wide range of playstyles and challenges
An endless mode for players who want to keep going beyond the standard run structure
A chase mode that surrounds you with constant pressure from all directions at once
Runs are designed to take around 20 minutes to complete, making the game well-suited for focused sessions. The pacing keeps you engaged from the first floor to the last, with each card choice building a unique combination of rules that defines how that particular run feels. Some runs will give you explosive offensive tools. Others will demand careful defensive play. The randomness of the card system means no two runs unfold the same way.
The visual style is clean and readable, keeping the board easy to parse even as the pressure mounts. Piece positions, shot angles, and movement options all need to be understood at a glance, and the design supports that kind of quick spatial thinking. Playing through MuMuPlayer on PC extends that clarity further, giving you a full-sized display that makes tracking the board state considerably easier than on a smaller screen. The stable desktop environment also removes the interruptions that can break your concentration during a critical turn, letting you stay focused on the decisions that matter.