Same board. New depth. Zero luck.
Chess Players,
Meet Your
Next Obsession.
You know the 8×8 board. You know the satisfaction of outthinking your opponent move by move. Command & Capture takes everything you love about chess — the spatial reasoning, the pure strategy, the zero-luck tension — and adds asymmetric civilizations, dual-state unit cards, ranged projectile attacks, and a Commander whose aura transforms the units around it.
Command Rome's disciplined formations or Egypt's precision ranged forces. Capture the enemy Commander or storm their Fortress to win. No dice. No randomness. Just strategy.
How the Game Works
Every unit card has two sides — two completely different sets of movement, capture, and blocking rules. Flipping between states costs your entire action for the turn. When you commit, you commit.
A unit that flips must wait one full turn before it can flip back. You can't abuse both sides freely — every flip is a calculated risk with real consequences.
Archers in Volley state, Siege Equipment deployed, and Chariots in Strike state fire at range — attacking over units without moving. Range changes everything about board control.
In Command State, adjacent allies each get an extra action per turn. In Fortify State, adjacent allies (except the Fortress) become immune to all captures. The Commander itself is never protected — always capturable.
Two Civilizations.
One Board.
Every Unit. Two States.
Each card is a decision. Flip it and everything changes — movement range, capture rules, blocking ability. The board is the same. The strategy never is.
Two Ways to Win
Hunt down and capture the enemy Commander. Every move is a calculation — protect yours, expose theirs. Both players hold the same dual win condition at all times.
Every army fields a Fortress. Disable it with any attack, then move a unit into its square to win. The Fortress fires projectiles in all 8 directions while Active — a deadly second target to protect.
Optional: 60-minute game clock, 2-minute turn timer. Miss your turn and your opponent gets two actions. At time, the player with the most captured points wins. Tie? Sudden Death — next capture wins.
Built for the Biggest
Strategy Community on Earth
"In the U.S., more people play chess than tennis and golf combined."
— AGON / YouGov ResearchAbout the Designer
Sam Lewman is a game designer, IT professional, and published author from Grand Island, Nebraska. He is the creator of Command & Capture — a strategy game years in the making, built around one simple question: what would chess look like if it were designed today?
A lifelong chess player and strategic thinker, Sam set out to preserve everything that makes chess compelling — the zero-luck purity, the spatial depth, the one-move-changes-everything tension — while stripping away centuries of arbitrary convention. The result is a game with asymmetric civilizations, dual-state unit cards, and two ways to win, played on the board every strategic mind already knows.
Sam is also the author of The Life of Sam (2021), a memoir about faith, resilience, and personal transformation. That same spirit — of breaking things down to their core and rebuilding them into something true — runs through every decision in Command & Capture's design.
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