I love the concept of this game. It's magical girls and chess and turn based tactics, it's classic genres with new twists. Maybe it's been done before, but this is the first time I've run across it, and I had a ton of fun playing with the new pieces and mechanics.
I love the mechanics of unlocking and choosing pieces to build a team, too. The UI is pretty buggy and/or unintuitive, though, and it took me forever to figure out how to remove pieces or realize at all that you could have more than one of each piece. I wish the way mana worked was a bit better explained, too. And I'm still not sure if moving the starting pieces is even possible.
The biggest gameplay flaw is the inconsistent AI. Sometimes it plays perfectly, sometimes it runs headfirst into a brick wall. Neither of those things are great in the first place, and together they create an experience with really inconsistent difficulty. It's not a deal breaker, but this area could definitely be improved.
The difficulty ramp in terms of opponent pieces and placement was kind of all over the place. I had a very easy level after a challenging one, and I also had the same enemies twice in a row. I've heard it might be randomized, but I only played the game once. Maybe the weighting could be better.
I was having a lot of fun, almost had made it, and then...
I made a stupid mistake and my king got eaten. I hit restart... and the game kicked me into a level with six high-level enemies and only my starting magical girls. I wasn't sure if that was a glitch or deliberate; it felt grossly unfair to the point where I kinda lost all enthusiasm for the game and called it a day at that point. I had no idea the game was permadeath. I'm not a fan of that in general, and I really think that if this game has to have it, it should definitely have a check mechanic like chess normally does.
I think some people will complain about the slow pacing, but to be honest, for a game like this it works. The pixel art is great and the unique animations for each piece just give it that much more panache.
If there's one nitpick it's that I wish the info panel showed the enemy piece instead of the magical girl version of the piece when showing where each one can move.
The theme implementation is solid enough, although it's kinda the obvious one to go with in retrospect.
All in all I liked this entry a lot, and I feel it's one of the strongest of the ones I've looked at so far. I just really was bummed out by being unexpectedly kicked back to zero, and there are a few minor aspects that could be improved upon.