The Chessmaster

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The Chessmaster
Alignment	Bad
Appears in	Rayman Redemption
Location	The Lair of the Chessmaster
Portrayed by	{{{portrayed by}}}
Resistance
Attacks	Chess pieces, bowtie attack
Sex	{{{sex}}}
Species	{{{species}}}
Relatives	{{{relatives}}}

Well, well! Who dares enter my lair and challenge the Chessmaster? I'll have you know I've never lost a single match of chess!

—The Chessmaster, Rayman Redemption

The Chessmaster is a mini-boss in Rayman Redemption, who appears in the Lair of the Chessmaster - the third level of Playtopia. He challenges Rayman to a "chess match", where each player takes control of a king (white for Rayman, black for the Chessmaster), and the goal is to be the first to move one's king to the opposite end of the board.

The kings are moved by punching them, and can only move one square at a time. Since white goes first, Rayman is guaranteed to always win the game, if he can survive. From the second move on, the Chessmaster pull Chess pieces out of his hat, which attack Rayman and hinder his progress. After the fourth move, he will additionally hurl his red bowtie at Rayman like a boomerang. Rayman will need to clear out all the Chess piece minions before he can punch the white king one more step.

Once the white king reaches the other side of the chess board, the Chessmaster observes that he had been checkmated, although in his frustration he accuses Rayman of not playing fair. He relinquishes the Master key, and warns Rayman to get out of his domain, lest he feels like challenging him to a rematch.

• 
  The Chessmaster in the True Boss Rush.

Rayman can rematch the Chessmaster in the True Boss Rush, who now has a black color with purplish lips and hat, and stronger attacks.

Trivia

• Originally, the name of Chessmaster was Check and Mate, but this was cancelled.
• The Chessmaster uses samples of Razorbeard's voice from Rayman 2 The Great Escape.
• The Chessmaster is one of the bosses' whose battle was the most drastically changed since Rayman Redemption's early production. He had a life bar with eight health points as a possible reference to the number of rows or columns in a chessboard, and he took a much more active role in the fight, manipulating two different black chess pieces to attack Rayman. He would use the pawn to stomp Rayman, and would slide the tower in his direction to ram him. While in his hands, the chess pieces are missing their eyes and hands, but they grow them once the Chessmaster allows the pieces to act out of their accord, thus becoming exactly like the chess piece enemies in the final game. To fight back, Rayman had to push a white pawn towards the Chessmaster until it would hit his face, the pawn also missing hands and eyes. The location was also different, having a dark starry blue background, spikes below the chess board which had smaller squares, and a much more narrow arena cornered by two very tall red walls.
• The Chessmaster is the only boss or mini-boss in Rayman Redemption that cannot be attacked or harmed directly. He has no visible life bar.
• Despite not being a main boss, the Chessmaster is the only Playtopia antagonist to have his name featured in a level's title. If following the worlds' final level tradition from Rayman 1 to have the main boss's name in the title, this honor should have gone to the Menace in Brain Games.
• The game that Rayman and the Chessmaster play does not abide to any known rules of chess. In an actual chess game, a checkmate is not reached by moving one's king to the other side of the board, but by putting the opponent's king under attack without any legal moves to escape or block it.