Overview

Tabulo is a chess-flavored roguelike about building a scoring engine, not playing traditional chess. Inspired by the "find the broken combo" thrill of games like Balatro, Tabulo has you assembling a board over the course of a run—adding pieces, placing effect tiles, buying power-ups, and tackling optional challenges for extra bonuses.

The twist is elegant and unforgiving: your board only has so much room. Every placement is both a commitment and an opportunity cost, and the best runs come from squeezing maximum value out of a limited grid.

How It Plays

Rather than focusing on checkmates and openings, Tabulo is about positioning and synergy:

• Build a unique board every run, choosing from different boards and modifiers.
• Draft and place chess pieces that interact with one another in scoring-friendly ways.
• Layer in tiles—over a hundred of them—each with its own effect that can multiply (or sabotage) your plan.
• Spend resources on coins/powers that modify pieces, the board, or scoring rules to push your build over the top.

The core loop encourages experimentation: you’ll often start with a simple idea (e.g., cluster a certain piece type, build around adjacency, or chase a specific tile effect) and then pivot as new tools appear. Like the best roguelikes, the “correct” choice is usually contextual—what matters is what your current board can realistically support before it fills up.

The Combo Engine: Pieces, Tiles, Boards, and Coins

Tabulo’s depth comes from how many systems you can stack:

• Pieces: Multiple chess piece types beyond the basic feel, each offering different synergy angles. Your positioning choices matter because your layout determines what can interact.
• Tiles (100+): These are the heart of the score-chasing. Each tile has a unique effect, and learning which effects pair well is where mastery lives.
• Boards (10): Different boards introduce run-level modifiers, nudging you toward specific strategies or forcing you to play around constraints.
• Coins (25): Purchasable modifiers that can reshape a run by enhancing pieces, altering your board state, or boosting scoring potential.

The result is a game that rewards you for noticing patterns: adjacency setups, chaining effects, and recognizing when a “good” pickup is actually a trap because it consumes the final space you needed for a critical tile or piece.

Progression, Unlocks, and Replay Value

Even though each run is self-contained, Tabulo supports longer-term motivation by letting you grow your collection over time. You’ll discover and unlock new:

• pieces
• tiles
• boards
• coins

That expanding pool keeps runs fresh and helps the game avoid the “solved build” problem—when you unlock something new, it can create entirely new lines of play or make previously mediocre setups suddenly viable.

Difficulty and Bosses

Tabulo includes 8 difficulty levels, designed to steadily increase the pressure and demand cleaner execution. On top of that, there are 20 bosses meant to ensure that runs don’t blur together—expect rule-bending challenges that force adaptation rather than rote optimization.

If you enjoy games where the difficulty isn’t just “numbers go up” but also “your usual plan stops working,” Tabulo’s structure is built for that kind of escalating puzzle.

Mac Performance and System Requirements

Tabulo is lightweight on storage and supports both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs. The main compatibility note is graphics support—your Mac needs integrated graphics capable of full OpenGL 3.3 support.

Minimum Requirements (Mac)

• OS: macOS 10.13 or macOS 10.15
• Processor: x86_64 or ARM CPU (Apple Silicon)
• Graphics: Integrated graphics with full OpenGL 3.3 support
• Storage: 250 MB available space

Price and Discount

Price: $8.99

Current Discount: 10% off (where available)

Who It’s For

• Play Tabulo if: you like roguelike drafting, score optimization, and discovering absurd synergies through experimentation.
• Maybe skip if: you’re looking for a traditional chess experience or prefer long tactical matches over quick, iterative runs.

Verdict

Tabulo takes the familiar language of chess pieces and turns it into a compact, addictive roguelike puzzle about efficiency and compounding advantages. The constant tension between "one more upgrade" and "no more space" creates meaningful decisions every run, and the large pool of tiles, boards, coins, bosses, and difficulties gives Mac players plenty to chew on—especially if you love games that reward clever builds over perfect reflexes.