About the Game
Chess, but all your army has gone over to the white side, leaving you with nothing but your royal shotgun and your wounded pride. Carried by your dark folly, you decide it's time to teach those white pieces to fear the Shotgun King.
Every turn, you may either move your king or shoot at enemy pieces, after what you'll need to move again to reload your shotgun. Avoid checkmate and kill the enemy king to complete the floor. After each floor, you may choose between two random combinations of one upgrade for you and one upgrade for the other side. Choose wisely and keep on winning floors and you just may get your kingdom back.
Runs may take ~20 minutes to complete. The game features 15 ranks of difficulty, unlockable cards, over 100 achievements to complete, an endless mode, and now a chase mode where you get continually assailed from all sides!
Screenshots
7 images
Version Information
Steam Patch Notes
Official update history
Hi Royals,
It's very important to us that when you get your butt handed to you by the game, you cannot put the blame on bugs. This new stability patch goes one more step towards achieving this.
This patch fixes the last of the issues that were reported to us on our Discord. If you find any more, please come on there and tell us about it so that we may fix it!
Here's the changelog for this version:
\ Fixed a bug where if the pike-wielding apocalypse horseman killed a holoking, the game would go into an existential crisis.
\ Unicorns and Sokoban rooks can no longer kill you by pushing you off the board's edge if you have Elusive.
\ Throwing a Theocracized bishop at a rook while Castle is active will no longer confuse the game into crashing.
\ Using Force-feeding when missing a grenade with the Attila will now properly load an additional shell anyway.
\ Slayer's soul description no longer says you can create a slayer if you have Soul Projection. (you can't)
\ Bold Plan will no longer duplicate cards in the card pool.
\ Rumble is back for gamepads and SteamDeck!
\ The reboot button works once again!
\ Added a secret button in-game to input cheatcodes on the SteamDeck
We wish you a lovely end of the week, and a nice 3-days weekend for all our non-American monarchs!
Act wisely,
-PUNKCAKE Délicieux 🥞
Hello Royals,
Here's another patch just in time for your regal weekend! This one fixes almost all the issues that were reported to us. We're just left with one tiny issue with the rebooting button in the modding interface, and one other issue where it seems that controller rumble may not work properly on Windows. We'll take care of both these issues next week!
If you find any other bugs, please let us know about it on our Discord!
Here's the full changelog for this version:
\ Fixed a crash when a black piece's placement threatened an Imperial Shot Put
\ Black Pieces can no longer attack Imperial Shot Puts.
\ Bushido no longer disables folly shields after its first use during a same turn.
\ Pawns can no longer use Lightfoot to get close to the king if you have August Presence.
\ Dead Flesh Wall pawns can now be pushed with knockback.
\ You can now use a grenade after reloading it by jumping over a piece with the Attila if you didn't have any grenade when the turn started.
\ In the Bold Plan menu, you can now choose cards that were recycled or unchosen during the card choice just past.
\ Switching from mouse controls to gamepad controls while on the disrupt menu will now resume the proper controls.
\ Stoning stones now have a small trail showing you their direction.
\ You can now hold ALT to force aim over other interactions.
\ Switched to single card inspection because of a visibility issue with the Extra White Choice burden in Charnier. (this will also make our lives way easier for future updates, thanks for understanding)
\ Using RB to go to souls now works even while using the trackpads.
\ Cheatcode input is no longer timed.
\ Cheatcode vision now resets when you return to the main menu.
\ Added cheatcode "busy" to restart your run instantly.
Have a wonderful weekend, love you all!
-PUNKCAKE Délicieux 🥞
Hi Royals,
Thank you so much for all the love on the Bad Company update! Somehow the game got its highest number of simultaneous players during the weekend, 4 years after its original release. That's crazy! We are so, so humbled.
We're still on the hunt for some of the more complex bugs that were reported, but we did manage to fix quite a few annoying ones, so we wanted to get this patch out of the way, and there will be another patch soon to fix what problems remain.
We also had a few issues with the MacOS build and also with SteamDeck controls when the update dropped, but I'm happy to say we already uploaded fixes for all these in the last few days. We do apologize about these issues happening in the first place, clearly we didn't make enough time to test both these platforms before the launch. A lesson for next time.
Here's the full changelog for v1.619:
\ Black Mist is no longer activated when the boss tries to eat a non-king black piece
\ Cards reversed by Disruption can now be turned face down
\ Disruption effect doesn't offer to reverse flipped cards anymore
\ Sabotage now works on Flesh Wall
\ Flesh Wall + fatal Death Mark won't stop the folly shield from working anymore
\ Rapunzel now spawns even if you throw towers on other pieces or over the board. It seems you can't escape her too.
\ Soul Projection can now be used even if movement with the soul is impossible
\ Pawns jumping with lightfoot won't reveal a disguised king anymore
\ Expulsion achievement doesn't count pawns anymore (in accordance with the description)
\ Force-Feeding now works with Attila
\ Fixed a crash when pieces are marked with no Death Mark card active.
\ Fixed the Tragic Homecoming flavor text.
\ Crash when double pressing the confirm button on a controller while on the "back" button in the pause menu.
Thanks again, for the support, but also for reporting all these bugs! Couldn't do it without you!
Have a great rest of the week and long live the Shotgun King,
-PUNKCAKE Délicieux 🥞
Hi royals,
It has come to our attention that the last build broke the tutorial. Now we all know that you're all very intelligent (perhaps more intelligent than players of other games, but we don't have the numbers) and you certainly never needed a tutorial in the first place, but nonetheless we have finally taken the time to fix the crash.
That's the only change on this version. If anything else breaks, please let us know on our Discord!
Cheers, wishing you a regal day, evening or night.
-PUNKCAKE Délicieux
Hi royals!
It's been a little while but we finally found some time to fix the issues with some of the languages on Steam Deck and MacOS. We sincerely apologize for the time it took to figure this one out. To be completely honest I'm still not sure what was wrong in the first place, but we managed to fix it.
Complete changelog:
The game should no longer crashes on launch for some languages
You can now select all languages independently of which platform you're on
2025 is turning out to be a year of experimentation with new ideas for us, with lots of new games being prepared for their Steam release, but we haven't forgotten about Shotgun King, and we're still wanting to make new content for it. We'll have news in 2026.
Cheers!
-PUNKCAKE Délicieux
This is a really tiny patch, since we didn't get any new bug reports since v1.515f! (yay for that!)
When we did the 1.5 update, we tried to have all the translations updated in time for it, and for the most part we succeeded. But sadly the person was going to take care of the German translation had some last minute personal issues to deal with. Initially we decided to wait it out, but after 3 months we finally decided to simply give the job to someone else. And so we have a full German translation again! Many thanks to Raven who ended up being the one to take care of it.
We also got word that the French translation had a few mistakes in it, so we also took the time to fix those as well.
And that's it, this is the full changelog:
- Updated the german translation
- Fixed a few minor issues on the french translation
Since it appears we're finally at a point where the game is as stable as it's gonna get, we'll be sending this version to the console folks, so that they can begin the work of porting the 1.5 update to consoles. Hopefully it won't be much longer until it gets there!
Thanks for playing everyone, and thank you for the many answers to the survey we posted last week! We'll leave it open for another week and then we'll close it and let you know about the results.
Have a wonderful weekend!
-PUNKCAKE Délicieux
Here's another patch with a few bugfixes, but also with a new and hopefully more stable save system! This new system was built to avoid situations where saves would get corrupted without a safe backup for the game to revert to. It might still happen, but even then, the new system should be able to make it so you can still play the game at least.
Here is the full changelog for this version:
- Now using a new save system which should be more stable!
- Fixed a crash when Lady in the Tower should have saved you from other pieces after landing in their way
- Fixed phrases with no space characters in story screens and in tutorial not showing correctly
- Fixed CRT shader for MacOS
- Fixed 'require' only returning the first result of the required file
Thanks for playing! Have a great weekend!
-PUNKCAKE Délicieux 🥞
Here's another patch with a few bugfixes for bugs that were reported after the patch from Monday! Apologies in particular for the text bug that cut off a lot of in-game descriptions for the Chinese, Korean and Japanese localizations. We realize how annoying it must have been, so we tried to fix it as fast as we could.
If you find other bugs, please come report them on our Discord, it's much easier for us to keep track of them there!
Here's the changelog for v1.515e:
- Phrases with no space characters (notably in Chinese, Korean and Japanese) are now properly broken down into multiple lines again
- Pieces will no longer randomly stop acting at all
- Folly shields no longer warn you against safe Sokoban Rooks
- Knockback angle now calculated before strafe movement with Royal Loafers
- Sabotaging the Mangonel card will now cancel prepared mangonel shots
Have some great holidays everyone!
-PUNKCAKE Délicieux 🥞
Hello royals!
Thank you for your patience on this one. There were a lot of bug reports in the last two weeks, thanks for that, it really helps us fixing them! Most of them were pretty minor, and some were more annoying. In particular we're really sorry about the issues that some Steam Deck and gamepad users encountered, some of which were pretty bad. We unfortunately do not have a Steam Deck ourselves to test the game, and the core of our community plays with mouse and keyboard, so we're low on controller-playing feedback.
Nonetheless, we did our best to fix all the issues that were reported, including the ones specific to Steam Deck and controller support. Please let us know how we did!
On top of all these fixes, we also added a new thing that was requested on our Discord server: each individual shotgun now tracks the best rank you've won with it! We were not saving this progress before this patch, so you'll have to win at least one run to see it in action, but we hope it'll motivate you to play the game with the shotguns you don't usually pick up!
And finally, this patch brings two new languages to the game: Italian and Brazilian Portuguese! Thank you to Primo Vinicio Calabrese and Emerson P. Machado respectively for making the game accessible to even more people!
Here is the full changelog:
- You can now track your best rank won on each shotgun in Throne mode
- Added Italian and Portuguese localizations!
- Rooks can no longer protect the king with Castle when stunned
- Tentative fix for a bug on controllers where the right stick stops responding
- Fixed a bug on controllers where confirming your first move would send you to inspect your cards
- Move squares no longer flash at the start of your turn if you're holding right stick
- First choice on level ups no longer flashes when the appearing animation ends
- Fixed a bug where receiving ammo at the same time as you reloaded
- Further refined arrow folly shield detection
- Tentative fix for a bug where arrows kill you when they hit the square you just moved from
- Prevented level up screen duplication
- Bleeding buffs every separate shot from Unjust Decree
- Force-feeding now properly capped to 8 shells, even with Yvan IV
- Fixed piece %hp bonuses
- Mausoleum now gets the leader tag as intended
- Castle, Theocracy, Commoner's Reign, and Heir cards now all get the leader tag
- Can no longer get sanctified bishops' souls with the Wand of Souls
- Extra kings now get leader bonuses during the boss battle
- Removed irrelevent delay after white piece moves when there is no bow and arrows
- Vampire boss king can now properly suck the blood off the pieces surrounding it on all sides
- Codex back button now always shows above card descriptions
- Black Mist should no longer move you into arrows
- Fixed a bug where some achievement-tracking stats were not properly reset on hitting try again on the gameover
- Kite Shields now properly block and get used up by rats and taunting hops
- Castling now properly protects the king from rats and taunting hops
- Seer's Orb no longer lets you cycle through a piece's options
- Grenades will now always trigger Castle before doing damage to any pieces
- Castling now protects the king from bleeding
- Ambush no longer gets the grenade tag
- Fixed the Humiliation achievement so that it only triggers when killing a king by hopping on him
- You can now use grenades again right after refilling them with a disruption effect
- Can no longer shoot after resigning while being stuck in Analysis Paralysis
- Mangonels won't show the targetting line if they're not about to attack because of Selective Listening
- Unicorns no longer charge you if you're in stealth mode
- Plural forms of words now properly reset when switching languages
- Fixed a bug that prevented Sokoban rooks from trying to push you
- Folly shields now detect Sokoban rooks who can push you off the board
- Fixed a bug where Sokoban rooks or the pieces they push wouldn't fully register as going to their destination if the piece previously at that destination was just pushed off the board, resulting in other pieces being able to move to that same destination and stacking with the piece that just got there
- The Royal Hunt's description now mentions the shooting speed increment on stack
- Low-Cost Disguise's description now says "when a pawn dies" instead of "when you kill a pawn"
Thank you all for the support! Long live the Shotgun King!
-PUNKCAKE Délicieux 🥞
---
Edit: Just put up a new quickpatch which takes care of a crash that was introduced with the 1.515 patch. Here's the full changelog for v1.515b:
- Fixed a crash on picking the disrupt reload option
- Fatality check now takes Bodyguard, Kite Shield and Cathedral into account
Edit 2: Just put up another quickpatch after it was reported that controller controls were still bugged. After some testing it appeared that the version of Steam's dev stuff we were using was outdated and it's possible the issues people were having were simply Steam Input acting up because of this. I also fixed some other bugs, here the full changelog for v1.515c:
- Fixed a crash when releasing the soul of a sanctified bishop with no soul slot
- Fixed a visual bug where after killing a santified bishop it looks like you're about to steal its soul even if you don't have an empty soul slot
- Codex and Shotgun progress badges no longer share the same save space
- Updated Steam API, which hopefully fixes the controller issues a few people have been having
Thanks to everyone who reported bugs on our Discord! We did a first quickpatch on Tuesday to fix one hard crash and instances of the game crashing on launch on Linux and Mac. Now we take care of the more minor stuff. Here's the changelog for this one!
- Elusive now works properly with pieces than are blocked
- Pieces no longer update their move timer while they're stunned
- Only the first rat hitting a bleeding piece during the same turn gets the bleed bonus
- No more double sound on pause exit
- Stun now transfers to morphing pieces
- Adjusted deepwater description (Knight can't attack from moat)
- Commoner's Reign now adds a knight to the white army
- Sokoban rooks can't push leaders anymore
- False Kings morph to knight AFTER bouncing back to board with Bouncy Castle
- Monarch's Confidence doesn't give negative firepower for overfed shotgun anymore
- Triggering Spy with Black Mist won't result in multiple disrupt panels and deafening sound
- Militia is now properly removed from pawn when sabotaged
- Seer's Orb attack target is now updated after holoking's death
- Humiliation achievement is now fixed
- Finer arrow detection for folly shields
- Lifting the Seer's Orb's target with King's Shoulders now sends the Seer's Orb to some other piece
As usual, thank you all for the love and support! We hope you're enjoying the new content!
-PUNKCAKE Délicieux 🥞
Thank you all so much for the love since the 1.4 update dropped! It's really heartwarming to see all the new positive reviews, it makes us feel like you appreciate the work we put into all this, and it's a very nice feeling! Plus it's so cool to see the mods popping up on the Steam Workshop, we're thinking of highlighting some of them soon!
There's been quite a few minor bugs reported since the update dropped. Thankfully it seems we did manage to fix the major stuff during the beta week, so that's nice. There was also some unfinished business on the modding side, so we took care of that too. The patch notes are quite long as a result, so we recommend wearing your reading glasses if you're really going to read all of it. (nerds)
Here are the full patch notes for v1.41:
- You can now read mods' descriptions (or at least the start of it) in the mod menu.
- Fixed a typo in Bloodless Coups' english description.
- Fixed controller rumble not initializing correctly on launch.
- Fixed some controls counting twice or too early for both mouse controls and gamepad.
- The shotgun and rank menu arrows now light up red again.
- Attempting to use blade on iron pieces now triggers a folly shield.
- Restored mouse drag controls for King's Shoulders.
- Analysis Paralysis now properly pauses the timer.
- Mod menu buttons won't get misplaced anymore if you spam-click the arrows.
- Fixed switch back to gamepad controls on game over when using a mouse and a gamepad is plugged in.
- Fixed a bug on the level up screen where a choice's descriptions sometimes wouldn't go away if clicking too fast.
- Cannonballs are no longer affected by Saddle.
- Catalan language was added back.
- In settings the back button will now translate every time the language is changed.
- Mod menu buttons are now always drawn with the pixel font, showing the correct icons.
- Fixed an issue with game mode descriptions when scrolling.
- Title will no longer appear behind the play menu when coming back from the tutorial and mods are present.
- Game will now switch back to the default language if a modded language was previously selected but is no longer available.
- Mods can now access mouse controls variables
- Both local and workshop versions of a same mod will now be loaded up.
- Made the mod menu's upload buttons a little nicer.
- If an upload fails it will now tell you why and also print the reason in the log.txt.
- 'run' function now allowed in mods to restart the game.
- Empty mods (no language, game modes nor script) will no longer be loaded up.
- Fixed append and prepend so that they wouldn't crash if multiple mods use them. (or any, in the case of prepend)
- Now properly allowing global variable replacement for a set of variable names. (check 'gimme("replaceable")')
- Mods can now use newbnk, bset, bget, and savbnk to safely save players' progress to a mod-specific save.
- Custom pieces can now have custom movement, custom attack, custom draw, and custom debris.
- Added "cond_only_pieces" in language keys.
- Replaced deprecated function table_from_file with quarentine_req and quarentine_req_env.
- Fixed unhelpful "Error in error handling" error message when a mod's code crashes the game.
- Added support for custom pieces' souls.
- Shotgun sprites are now mode-specific. (load your spritesheet in initialize())
- Fixed custom pieces effects not showing in card descriptions.
- Fixed the Saddle carry effect when applied to non-knight & non-rook pieces.
- Added piece properties nocarry and freelift, they can be given with custom cards.
- Added support for custom game mode scores.
We hope you keep enjoying the game! We'll be back with some more news soon!
Have a lovely day!
-PUNKCAKE Délicieux 🥞
Hi everyone!
Some quick patch notes for you! Last week we did a sneaky engine update on the game. The engine update fixed a game-launching crash that some people had, but unfortunately it also broke a few things inside the game. So then we quickly made a patch for the first few issues that were reported, and just now we uploaded a second patch that fixes some other issues that remained.
Sorry about all this, the good news is that now the game should be even more stable than it was on v1.37! Here's the complete changelog for the two patches!
v1.38 changelog:
- Engine update
- Fixed wrong arrow sprites shown around the Black King.
- Fixed a random softlock with unjust decree + sawed-off justice.
- Added basic backup system for saves, so that the game can recover on its own if your save is corrupt for whatever reason.
v1.39 changelog:
- Fixed a crash that happened when getting pushed back onto a pentagram or an undercover mission tile with Sawed-off Justice.
- It's no longer possible to get back onto the last of three pentagrams before they're done resetting.
- Fixed pawn souls not increasing damage with Cannon Fodder.
- Folly shields will now properly activate in case of an unsafe point-blank kill or blade kill. (still won't save you from discovered checks though)
- Cannonballs can no longer spawn on the same tile.
That's it for now! We hear you about bringing controller support and the console version's tutorial to PC, we're working on it!
Have a great weekend, long live the shotgun king!
-PUNKCAKE Délicieux 🥞
Current Release
Not available
System Requirements
How to Install
shotgun_king.exe to play
Troubleshooting tips
• Run Redist/_CommonRedist installers if game won't start
• Add folder to Windows Defender exclusions
• Run as administrator
Download
Direct link available
104 MB
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Download Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate for PC with a direct link or via torrent. Get the full version of Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate for free. Shotgun King: The Final Checkmate is a Action released by PUNKCAKE Delicieux.