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seabass 1 minutes ago [-]
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.
kingofmen 12 minutes ago [-]
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.
Doches 6 hours ago [-]
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!
That's awesome! I've been working on nearly this exact same idea as a prototype in Godot. Looks like my work is done! ;-)
Doches 6 hours ago [-]
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.
selimthegrim 6 hours ago [-]
So, Battle Chess 2026?
Doches 6 hours ago [-]
You’ve got me; I was very much a Battle Chess addict once upon a time…
bbx 4 hours ago [-]
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.
tantalor 4 hours ago [-]
Simply click, don't drag
reassess_blind 2 hours ago [-]
That's not very Product Manager of you.
eig 1 hours ago [-]
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.
TheGRS 3 hours ago [-]
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 :)
XCSme 6 hours ago [-]
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.
kalx 5 hours ago [-]
Impossible?
XCSme 5 hours ago [-]
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.
impendia 4 days ago [-]
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.
TheGRS 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bastardo 3 hours ago [-]
Isn't it pretty obvious? At least I recognized them.
(which I played manically until I managed _1_ perfect game of --- still have the box/disk....)
addandsubtract 4 hours ago [-]
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.
smu3l 4 hours ago [-]
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.
ath92 4 hours ago [-]
Tapping on the prince also shows move order
pdxandi 36 minutes ago [-]
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!
sandgraham 6 hours ago [-]
Someone on the leaderboard got to 118? Would be fun to watch that replay.
16 6 hours ago [-]
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).
cowboy_henk 5 hours ago [-]
It was a matter of time I suppose. Would love to see the solver!
Daviey 3 hours ago [-]
Well done for scoring 2nd place. :)
purple-leafy 4 hours ago [-]
Haha so clever love it! Must look into a beam solver
vovavili 4 hours ago [-]
I would expect no less from Hacker News, good job.
medbar 6 hours ago [-]
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
orsenthil 7 hours ago [-]
Very nice. Enjoyed playing this. I know Chess, what is Roguelike here ?
coldcity_again 6 hours ago [-]
In the most general terms, a procedurally generated world with permadeath. The term's inspired by Rogue[1].
In this game, I think _some_ of the less general terms (stricter definition) also apply: turn-based movement, grid-based movement.
devdoxxx 1 hours ago [-]
This game is fun af man you were on to something
jerlam 4 hours ago [-]
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.
sajithdilshan 3 hours ago [-]
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
bastardo 3 hours ago [-]
That's fun. I may have missed it when starting: What are the rules of movement for the opponents?
joshuakcockrell 3 hours ago [-]
They have the same movement as their equivalent chess pieces.
purple-leafy 4 hours ago [-]
Great game! Is it a different board each day?
amenghra 4 hours ago [-]
Well done. I think it's deterministic, i.e. playing the same board + same moves again spawns same enemies.
fsddfsdfssdf 7 hours ago [-]
Well done, Claude!
cowboy_henk 5 hours ago [-]
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).
purple-leafy 4 hours ago [-]
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
avarun 4 hours ago [-]
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)
fhn 6 hours ago [-]
no bad but the blue and red characters, I have no idea what they are
joemi 5 hours ago [-]
I think those are bishops, and they have different colors based on which color spaces they start on.
foobarqux 7 hours ago [-]
What is Rogue-like about this?
tweetle_beetle 6 hours ago [-]
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.
"Rogue-like" is the most over-used term these days. It now has almost no meaning, compared to what it used to mean.
axus 4 hours ago [-]
NES-game-with-no-battery-like
j_4 4 hours ago [-]
thank you for the kind words!
Zebfross 3 hours ago [-]
Fun game! There should be a check mate though, right?
ChessGenome 7 hours ago [-]
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
fidrelity 6 hours ago [-]
I think it can be reached through settings, then the question mark.
Explanation of the pieces would be nice too!
ecesena 4 days ago [-]
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!
AgentMasterRace 42 minutes ago [-]
Wait until you see my curling rogue like. Spoilerz curling fucking sucks solo.
55555 7 hours ago [-]
This is really really awesome
Hugsbox 4 hours ago [-]
This is awesome :) thanks OP
Chipatama90 3 hours ago [-]
This is amazing!
alexhans 5 hours ago [-]
Fun, responsive and intuitive. Congrats.
lxe 5 hours ago [-]
Genuinely interesting, thank you.
NickC25 6 hours ago [-]
Big chess fan here.
This is great!
egyptianblue 5 hours ago [-]
That was a lot of fun
pjm331 6 hours ago [-]
great game well done i could easily play this for far too long
heyarviind2 4 days ago [-]
This is really cool, bookmarked it
ahmedehab_01 4 hours ago [-]
Looks really cool, keep going!
docheinestages 5 hours ago [-]
This is amazing!
explosionpunch 11 hours ago [-]
This is really fun and intuitive. Pretty, too. What did you build it in?
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.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3856240/Pieces_of_the_Kin...
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 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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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....)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)
(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)
Pawnbarian is more chess-inspired than a chess themed, but actually rogue(lite)-like and very good.
https://j4nw.com/pawnbarian/
Explanation of the pieces would be nice too!
This is great!