Odd Chess Games: Dexter's Laboratory Chess Challenge

The "battle chess" motif was popular for a while back in the late 90's and early 2000's. This style of game involved the pieces acting out a "battle" between the pair when a piece is taken by another.

Dexter's Laboratory: Chess Challenge is one of those oddballs that surprised me with its existence. Being one of three chess games on the Gameboy Advance it quite easily earns the title as the most unique on the system.

The Characters

One of the draws of the game is to play with characters from the show. You are given a total of four characters to play as, and they each come with their own themed sets: Dexter, Deedee, Mandark, and Major Glory. [^1]

The pieces are a good representation of characters that are recurring in the cartoon.

Dexter is equipped with different forms of himself that appear within the Dexter universe. Deedee has her friends, both real and imaginary. Mandark has his various incarnations and Quackor, the evil duck, as a pawn. Major Glory has his superhero compatriots.

If the player has trouble differentiating the pieces at first they can press the Select button to bring up a 2D view of the game-board.

Battle Animations

Each piece available to each each character seem to have its own way of "fighting" with the other pieces when they capture.

An animation of Dexter's knight taking Deedee's queen

The pawns that are flies will either be literally captured or get squished. The various Dexters will use their laboratory technology to do the deed. Valhallen will play a guitar riff to take care of the piece that is bothering him.

The animations can be quite humorous and are worth the time to watch, at least the first time you see them.

Puzzles

The game features a puzzle section with three levels of difficulty: easy, medium, and hard. As you complete puzzles new ones are unlocked for you to try:

Each level is "themed" in a sense as well:

• Easy: Mate in 1, white to move
• Medium: Mate in 1, black to move
• Hard: Mate in 2, white to move

The puzzles in the easy level where not that difficult to figure out, but I was impressed that they seemed to be trying to teach the player some motifs such as pins and skewers in the higher levels. Of course there was no text to indicate to the player what they just learned, but if you go into it with knowledge you will notice what they were doing.

The final puzzle is pictured below, can you solve this mate in 2?

It was interesting to me that the computer had to think for each puzzle move, as opposed to just having the correct ones listed in memory.

Outro

Overall this game was pretty fun, but very limited in replay-ability outside of just playing the computer on higher difficulties. The animations are entertaining and the primary draw of this game. The puzzle system left a little bit to be desired.

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[^1]: Details on the names of individual characters presented in the themed sets can be found on the Dexter's Lab Wiki, here: https://dexterslab.fandom.com/wiki/Dexter%27s_Laboratory:_Chess_Challenge.