Welcome back to the board. This update lands three big improvements at once: Chess Kingdom now runs natively on Steam Deck, the AI plays smarter by actually looking at the whole position before it commits to a move, and we've gone through the entire localization stack so the game feels native in every supported language.

Steam Deck — Native Linux Build

Chess Kingdom now launches directly on Steam Deck without forcing Proton compatibility. Just install, hit Play, and you're in. No fiddling with launch options, no compatibility tool overrides — it Just Works on SteamOS Gaming Mode.

Under the hood we ship the same controller-friendly UI, full Steam Cloud sync (your Windows save and your Deck save stay in step), and the SDL gamepad bridge so the Deck's controls behave the same way they do on Windows.

Smarter AI — Position-First Thinking

Every AI opponent has been upgraded to analyze the full board position before deciding what to play, instead of reactive move-by-move calculation. The result is opponents that play more like a real chess player would: they spot tactical motifs in the current position, weigh longer-term plans, and don't blunder pieces because of a missing depth-1 oversight.

You'll feel the difference most clearly at the higher difficulties — Hard, Master, and Legend tiers in particular have a noticeably steadier game now. Easy and Normal still play to their tier (the AI knows when to make a "human-style" mistake on the easier difficulties — the goal is a fair game, not crushing the player). At Hard and above, expect to actually have to think.

The same upgrade applies to AI personalities, the elimination ladder, the league system, and tournament bots. Whatever mode you're playing, the bots are now thinking about the whole position before they move.

Localization Across the Board

We did a top-to-bottom audit of all shipped languages and fixed the rough edges. The headlines:

Chinese (Simplified and Traditional) — both locales are now 100% complete, every key from the English source is translated. Fonts have been bundled with the game so Chinese characters render correctly even on systems without OS-level CJK font support (notably Steam Deck's stock install). The Latin-headline-into-CJK-body composition uses a per-character font fallback so titles in Cinzel and body text in Noto Sans CJK look natural together.

Russian

The previously partial translation is now fully filled in (479 missing keys filled). Cyrillic fonts are bundled the same way as the CJK ones, so Russian players on Steam Deck or minimal Linux installs see proper Cyrillic instead of fallback boxes. Pieces, terms, time controls.

Achievement names — fixed a bug where achievements were displaying their internal slug names instead of the translated display names in non-English locales. Affected every locale including English (the slug-vs-id mismatch was pre-existing). Now your Tactician, Titan Slayer, and 50 other achievement titles show in your chosen language.

Catch-the-regression suite — a screen-by-screen visual sweep across 52 game screens × all locales runs as a pre-release gate now, so future translations can't ship with overflow, font fallback, or missing-translation issues unnoticed.

I'm keeping the cadence going — controller polish, more AI personalities, prestige cosmetics for level-100 players, and the GPU acceleration path for Steam Deck are all in flight. As always, if something doesn't feel right, let me know on Steam Discussions.

See you at the board.