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Don't be put off by the title; this is not a chess game. Well, it is and it isn't. I will try and explain. You are experiencing a nightmare in which you play a pawn. The board is against you, the pieces are after your blood and the crowd hates you. All you have to do is survive.

The chessboard is like a football stadium with crowds on three sides. You appear from a tunnel and make your way to the starting line at the front edge with the crowd booing you all the way. You start with five pawns and have to get as many as you can over to the other side and back again.

There are four things that can stop you and cause loss of a life. Contact with an enemy piece, moving off the side of the board, moving onto a red square or being hit by a bomb thrown from the crowd - it seems that it is not just us that has a hooligan problem.

The first piece to try and stop you is a knight. As you move, one square at a time, the squares that you land on turn blue. If the knight then lands on one of these blue squares, it changes to red and becomes a no-go area. This requires some thought on your part as you will have to make up to nine journeys - going across five times and coming back four.

The 3D animation of you and the pieces is very well done indeed although I found things slightly difficult to judge on the far side of the board.

You score ten points every time you get a pawn across with a bonus if you get all the pawns that you started out with over to the other side. A nasty little trick here is that if you pause the game for any reason, you lose 20 points.

When all your pawns are on the other side, you progress to the next level - bishop, rook, king and queen before going into the more lethal combination of pieces. All the pieces move as they do on a chessboard. All the levels present a different strategy to be worked out. Personally, I have great difficulty with the bishop and usually only have one or two pawns to take onto higher levels.

This is a nice little strategy game with yet another variation on the chess theme and very good graphics. It would have been better if there had been some more interesting sound to give it atmosphere or some means of self defence. I'm not too sure either about its addictive qualities. You always have to start at the beginning instead of being able to practise different screens or have a random level mode.