There must be something in the water! I’ve been working on a (very different) chess-like roguelike, and just released the demo. Check it out if you’re a fan of weird chess puzzles, bad chess puns, and Hnefatafl!
This is a great puzzle game. I think it actually teaches the concept of "piece coordination" in chess very well.
One suggestion is to have all enemy pieces move simultaneously. I expected that the losing condition is that I am threatened and there are no unthreatened squares to move (checkmate).
However, since the opponents move one-at-a-time, I found that even if I moved to a safe square, sometimes I could be both threatened and captured in the same move! Which is somewhat different from normal chess, since now you have to consider the possible orders in which the opponents move. So even moving to unthreatened squares could be a game over.
Great game. I love playing chess so this is quite a unique way to play it.
One piece of feedback: dragging a piece on mobile seems inaccurate at times. I’m used to chess apps where it works great. Here it seems the dragged piece doesn’t always end up where I’ve left my finger. I’ve lost a few rounds like this.
One tiny UI nitpick: I found the squares' hitboxes to be unintuitively small, requiring more-than-expected precision to get Chazz to land in the square I wanted. (I was initially confused about whether I was making an illegal move.) You might want to either increase the size of the squares, or make the "this square is the target" indicator more obvious.
Dang, that's really fun! I think its solid all-around and no notes on the core game loop.
If you want to make it more accessible to folks like myself who stink at chess, I'd recommend adding some sort of power-ups so that you can take multiple pieces, jump over obstacles, or freeze enemies in place. And with that you probably have a great little game to sell on Steam :)
I think it makes a pretty good assumption on understanding core chess rules, but yea that would be nice. The thing that did trip me up at first was not realizing the red and blue bishops were the same piece, I was wondering if I was missing something.
The AI can cheat, because it can move a blocking piece out of the way to then attack you in the same turn. Or maybe it's just something to keep in mind, but it caught me off guard.
Oh, I see that now. That makes it so much more interesting as a puzzle. I'll have to try again with that in mind. Got up near 20 but couldn't get past that. Played for like 45 minutes. Super fun!
That was me. The engine is deterministic so I wrote a beam solver for it. My score should've been 208 (pretty sure it could play forever; I capped the solver at a max time limit) but I messed up one of my moves (I was manually moving the pieces instead of submitting the final move list with curl).
Looks like enemy movements are deterministic, wonder how feasible it is to script this. Was able to increase my score by 4 points trying alternate lines near the end
Interesting, reminds me of Really Bad Chess where the pieces change whether you win or lose. If you're really bad the game might give you all queens or rooks.
There is some polish with Claude over the past few weeks, but we wrote the engine over 10 years ago actually. Each piece moves using a modified version of A* to simply find the shortest path to Prince Chazz (the piece controlled by the player).
You probably don’t need A*, do you actually want the AI to move optimally? That would infer the game ends sooner. You could probably just use greedy heuristics
Your passkey login doesn't even work. I think the nature of Claude usage here goes a bit beyond "some polish".
(For reference, signing back in with a passkey seems to be impossible even after successfully creating an account with one. Every time you sign in it attempts to save a new passkey right after asking for the old one)
I think I found a mini bug. Say I do a score of 10. Then I change board. Then I die with score < 10. I still have 10 for that board. It makes it easy to cheat the leaderboard :) Fun game!
There must be something in the water! I’ve been working on a (very different) chess-like roguelike, and just released the demo. Check it out if you’re a fan of weird chess puzzles, bad chess puns, and Hnefatafl!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3856240/Pieces_of_the_Kin...
Nice this is an actual roguelike
That's awesome! I've been working on nearly this exact same idea as a prototype in Godot. Looks like my work is done! ;-)
Ooh! I’d love to see that, or to have a chat and swap ideas. My email is in my profile if you’d be up for it.
So, Battle Chess 2026?
You’ve got me; I was very much a Battle Chess addict once upon a time…
This is a great puzzle game. I think it actually teaches the concept of "piece coordination" in chess very well.
One suggestion is to have all enemy pieces move simultaneously. I expected that the losing condition is that I am threatened and there are no unthreatened squares to move (checkmate).
However, since the opponents move one-at-a-time, I found that even if I moved to a safe square, sometimes I could be both threatened and captured in the same move! Which is somewhat different from normal chess, since now you have to consider the possible orders in which the opponents move. So even moving to unthreatened squares could be a game over.
Great game. I love playing chess so this is quite a unique way to play it.
One piece of feedback: dragging a piece on mobile seems inaccurate at times. I’m used to chess apps where it works great. Here it seems the dragged piece doesn’t always end up where I’ve left my finger. I’ve lost a few rounds like this.
Simply click, don't drag
That's not very Product Manager of you.
Excellent work, very nice!
One tiny UI nitpick: I found the squares' hitboxes to be unintuitively small, requiring more-than-expected precision to get Chazz to land in the square I wanted. (I was initially confused about whether I was making an illegal move.) You might want to either increase the size of the squares, or make the "this square is the target" indicator more obvious.
This is so fun! It would be cool to reuse the replay functionality in order to see how the top scorers managed to get such good scores.
Dang, that's really fun! I think its solid all-around and no notes on the core game loop.
If you want to make it more accessible to folks like myself who stink at chess, I'd recommend adding some sort of power-ups so that you can take multiple pieces, jump over obstacles, or freeze enemies in place. And with that you probably have a great little game to sell on Steam :)
Can't go over 19, seems to be a lot of RNG, sometimes pieces spawn around protecting each-other and you stuck between them, so not much you can do.
Impossible?
It is possible, just saying that I can't do it, and there's no logic behind it.
You just have to be lucky and stumble upon a sequence that allows you to surive.
The RNG is seeeded though, always same seed, so you can determinarically explore all moves and find some sequences that lead to higher scores.
This is cool!
One suggestion: some way to tell what the enemy pieces are? Maybe a legend to the right of the board? I ended up discovering by trial and error.
I think it makes a pretty good assumption on understanding core chess rules, but yea that would be nice. The thing that did trip me up at first was not realizing the red and blue bishops were the same piece, I was wondering if I was missing something.
Isn't it pretty obvious? At least I recognized them.
Charming!
Reminds me of Alice:
https://folklore.org/Alice.html
(which I played manically until I managed _1_ perfect game of --- still have the box/disk....)
The AI can cheat, because it can move a blocking piece out of the way to then attack you in the same turn. Or maybe it's just something to keep in mind, but it caught me off guard.
I think the order of enemy moves is deterministic. So if piece 1 blocks piece 2 from attacking you, piece 2 can attack if 1 moves out of the way.
Tapping on the prince also shows move order
Oh, I see that now. That makes it so much more interesting as a puzzle. I'll have to try again with that in mind. Got up near 20 but couldn't get past that. Played for like 45 minutes. Super fun!
Someone on the leaderboard got to 118? Would be fun to watch that replay.
That was me. The engine is deterministic so I wrote a beam solver for it. My score should've been 208 (pretty sure it could play forever; I capped the solver at a max time limit) but I messed up one of my moves (I was manually moving the pieces instead of submitting the final move list with curl).
It was a matter of time I suppose. Would love to see the solver!
Well done for scoring 2nd place. :)
Haha so clever love it! Must look into a beam solver
I would expect no less from Hacker News, good job.
Looks like enemy movements are deterministic, wonder how feasible it is to script this. Was able to increase my score by 4 points trying alternate lines near the end
Very nice. Enjoyed playing this. I know Chess, what is Roguelike here ?
In the most general terms, a procedurally generated world with permadeath. The term's inspired by Rogue[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)
In this game, I think _some_ of the less general terms (stricter definition) also apply: turn-based movement, grid-based movement.
This game is fun af man you were on to something
Interesting, reminds me of Really Bad Chess where the pieces change whether you win or lose. If you're really bad the game might give you all queens or rooks.
The game is quite great, but the queen movement is flaky. Even if it carefully drag and drop it, it just moves to a different block
That's fun. I may have missed it when starting: What are the rules of movement for the opponents?
They have the same movement as their equivalent chess pieces.
Great game! Is it a different board each day?
Well done. I think it's deterministic, i.e. playing the same board + same moves again spawns same enemies.
Well done, Claude!
There is some polish with Claude over the past few weeks, but we wrote the engine over 10 years ago actually. Each piece moves using a modified version of A* to simply find the shortest path to Prince Chazz (the piece controlled by the player).
You probably don’t need A*, do you actually want the AI to move optimally? That would infer the game ends sooner. You could probably just use greedy heuristics
Your passkey login doesn't even work. I think the nature of Claude usage here goes a bit beyond "some polish".
(For reference, signing back in with a passkey seems to be impossible even after successfully creating an account with one. Every time you sign in it attempts to save a new passkey right after asking for the old one)
no bad but the blue and red characters, I have no idea what they are
I think those are bishops, and they have different colors based on which color spaces they start on.
What is Rogue-like about this?
You're right, it's just a puzzle game. Strange to use the theme of chess and change a queen into a prince too.
Pawnbarian is more chess-inspired than a chess themed, but actually rogue(lite)-like and very good.
https://j4nw.com/pawnbarian/
"Rogue-like" is the most over-used term these days. It now has almost no meaning, compared to what it used to mean.
NES-game-with-no-battery-like
thank you for the kind words!
Fun game! There should be a check mate though, right?
Very cool concept only annoying thing was I exited out of the instructions panel and then wanted to revisit it later but it seemed impossible
I think it can be reached through settings, then the question mark.
Explanation of the pieces would be nice too!
I think I found a mini bug. Say I do a score of 10. Then I change board. Then I die with score < 10. I still have 10 for that board. It makes it easy to cheat the leaderboard :) Fun game!
Wait until you see my curling rogue like. Spoilerz curling fucking sucks solo.
This is really really awesome
This is awesome :) thanks OP
This is amazing!
Fun, responsive and intuitive. Congrats.
Genuinely interesting, thank you.
Big chess fan here.
This is great!
That was a lot of fun
great game well done i could easily play this for far too long
This is really cool, bookmarked it
Looks really cool, keep going!
This is amazing!
This is really fun and intuitive. Pretty, too. What did you build it in?
i played some minutes, cool
Really fun !
well done!
This is so cool bro
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