This is me writing research questions the week after releasing the actual game, which probably isn’t all that kosher, but here we are.
In essence, the game asks an extension/version of the Chogue question, which is “what would a hybrid of Rogue and Chess be like?” Chogue answered that in one way, but as we’ve discussed, part of this hybridizing approach is that there are many, many branch points along the way where you can choose one game or another to determine a specific element of the rules.
As such, Rogess is perhaps most importantly an illustration of the fact of these many branches, pointing to the fact that Chogue isn’t the only or necessary destination of the hybridization question, it’s just the destination we reached according to the principles that guided us (perhaps most obviously comic value, but later also the desire to make a “good game” out of it, too).
Rogess takes its shape from the decision to examine chess pieces that combat each other with Rogue style (damage and hitpoints) as opposed to Chogue’s standard captures and dungeon setup. Essentially then it inverts/swaps two key decisions
Those are two waypoints in the significantly larger space of the possible intersections of both games. Probably not every set of decisions would lead to an interesting or productive game, of course, but I suspect a significant number of them would. Rogess is important at least in part because it’s a second data-point in this overall hybrid approach. In most senses it’s the simpler game, but it helps us to understand better that larger meta-question of design method.