Two identical boards can win or lose the same fight on placement alone. Magic Chess: GoGo gives you a 7-column, 3-row grid and a preparation phase between every round to use it. This guide covers how the fight's targeting works and how to place around it. It's genre logic applied to the game's own board and mechanics — reworded, not lifted from anyone's comp sheet.
The three rows
Front row (row 1): your tanks and any melee bruiser. Their job is to hold the line long enough for the back row to work. Aim for two bodies here minimum once your board fills out.
Mid row (row 2): the flex row — a second tank, a melee assassin, an off-carry, or a support who needs to be near the front. Anything that wants to be in the fight but isn't your primary win condition.
Back row (row 3): your main carry and your most fragile support. This is the safest real estate on the board — melee enemies have to walk through everything else to reach it.
Protect the carry
Enemy melee heroes and most assassins path to the nearest reachable target, so a carry alone on the back row is usually safe from them — until an assassin with a jump or dash ignores the front line and drops straight onto it.
Against a board with assassins or divers, tuck the carry into a back corner and stack a tank or a peel support in the mid-row tile next to it, so the diver lands into a body instead of onto the carry.
Against a board built on area damage — big ultimates, chain effects, AoE casters — do the opposite: spread the back row to the far corners so one cast can't catch the carry and the support together.
Placing the tanks
Two front-row tanks slightly apart is the default: close enough to both absorb pressure, far enough that AoE doesn't hit both plus whatever is behind them.
One tank can be pulled wide to a flank to soak an enemy assassin or split the enemy's focus, but don't strand a tank so far out that it dies alone before the fight matters.
Items like Ancient Wrath (taunts nearby enemies) want to be central and forward, where they'll pull the most attackers. See the Item Builds guide for what to put on the front line.
Hide the gear-holder
Some synergies crown whichever hero carries the most equipment — Astro Power's Astro Sovereign is the clearest example — and pile their bonus onto that one unit. If that hero is a backline carry, treat its tile as the single most important placement on your board and corner it.
A dedicated Magic Crystal carry — a hero you've pushed into a synergy with a crystal to make it broken — is the same: it's doing outsized work, so it gets the safest tile, not a convenient one.
Summoned units from synergies place themselves and can't be moved, so plan your real heroes around where the summons tend to spawn rather than expecting to control them.
Move between rounds
Positioning isn't set once. You can see each opponent's board before you fight them, and you get a preparation phase to react.
If the opponent's threat is a right-side assassin, shift your carry to the left corner for that round. If they've loaded AoE, spread. If they have neither, default placement is fine — don't overthink a fight you're winning on board strength.
In the last 10 seconds of every battle, Acceleration boosts damage and weakens healing and shields, so close fights break fast. Placement that buys your carry three extra seconds of life often decides the round.