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I had a lot of fun playing the game. I also made a local solver to see how far you can theoretically get, and it's definitely infinite if you play perfectly. Working on the local sim / solver was almost as fun as playing the game :)

"Chess-related roguelike" is a an very crowded genre for unclear reasons and it's difficult to stick out.

So far I've played Shotgun Queen and Pawnbarian. There's also Ouroboros King, Demoncrawl, The Rookery, Passant, Chess Survivors, Gambonanza, Mind over Monarchy, and many more.

There was even a Humble Bundle for mostly Chess-inspired indie roguelikes.

https://www.humblebundle.com/games/checkmate-chess-games-col...

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...

I'm hooked. I didn't even know I needed this.

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.

As the random is seeded, I would like an undo/redo button.

Fun game! And the subtle animation effects are great.

One suggestion...it's unclear to me why I would sign up. Maybe offer a few details so I know why I would sign up for this.

Before clicking on the link I thought this was going to be about Gambonanza, a game I've seen some people play on Youtube (on videos that I think were sponsored by the developer of the game, but I don't actually know). Haven't played Gambonanza but from what I can tell you are trying to capture all the rival pieces, you get a coin for each piece you capture, and when you succeed you can spend those coins to buy new pieces or give your pieces new powers (like a shield that protects a piece from the first time it would have been captured). So although it starts out with rules quite like chess (except not totally, e.g. you can have multiple kings and you don't lose until all your pieces are captured, so you can let your king be captured and win with your remaining rook), it can eventually evolve into something quite weird (a king that can also move like a knight, or a rook with protection from being captured, or a "golden" square on the board that if you capture an enemy on that square, you earn 2 or 3 coins instead of just 1).

Actually, Gambonanza kind of reminds me of Balatro in that way: start out with rules resembling the standard game, end up with some very weird combinations. Not really my cup of tea, but might be of interest to others.

Really neat idea. I like how the chess constraints make the choices feel readable without making it feel like regular chess.

Took me a minute to understand what was going on, but after that it clicked. Would be fun to see more piece-inspired mechanics added over time.

This is awesome! I'd appreciate being able to bring up a primer on the rules - perhaps a reiteration of what it says at the start plus a list of pieces and their moves, and maybe a brief description of what strategy the pieces apply when they move.

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.

Why did you make the player character, who wears a crown and moves like a queen, a prince?

UI drag/drop is a little clunky at times, but I love the overall vibe. Doesn’t really feel like a daily game, though. Feels more like it is being shoehorned into that model rather than just being a solo Game Game (like Tetris).

What I mean is as a player, I'll likely not notice the difference in a Friday puzzle vs a Thursday puzzle. And I can replay to my hearts content anyway. So why not simply randomize the board on each replay? Which I'd do anyway.

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 :)

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.

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.

This is very satisfying to play. Saw this game on steam that seems close in the « Rogue Like Chess » concept : https://store.steampowered.com/app/3509230/Gambonanza/

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....)

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.

Very cool!

Do you have any content on how you built it? I also enjoy making web-based games and would love to learn about other people's processes!

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.

Someone on the leaderboard got to 118? Would be fun to watch that replay.

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 cool idea! More of an arcade game though than a roguelike, but very enjoyable. One nit i have: it seems like the seed is fixed? where units spawn every turn.

Very nice. Enjoyed playing this. I know Chess, what is Roguelike here ?

Very nicely done ! I think I have a new addiction now !

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.

I thought it might be similar to this Playdate game, which is a sort of Chess RPG/adventure:

https://play.date/games/questy-chess/

Pretty unique and interesting...

You should add a timer. Bullet chess is fun

This is great! I would love this even more with a chess clock. 3+2 would be great!

This is cool! I personally really dislike having AI on the leaderboard as it feels completely antithetical to human play.

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!

What is Rogue-like about this?

Very fun game! I really like the idea. Already shared it with my chess group :D

Cool game.

Seeing as this is HN, please can you talk tech stack?

Well done, Claude!

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.

This game is fun af man you were on to something

no bad but the blue and red characters, I have no idea what they are

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

Love it. The knights seem much more annoying / powerful than you'd expect.

Great game! Is it a different board each day?

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

Well done. I think it's deterministic, i.e. playing the same board + same moves again spawns same enemies.

That's fun. I may have missed it when starting: What are the rules of movement for the opponents?

why does this suggest opening my password app the minute it loads?

https://i.imgur.com/MmJYyKG.png

Replay not working properly on mobile..?

This is really really awesome

there's a {glitch|feature} where the castle can kill you after another piece moves out of the way, it will...

Fun game! There should be a check mate though, right?

This is pretty fun!!

This is really fun and intuitive. Pretty, too. What did you build it in?

I love this so much

Fun, responsive and intuitive. Congrats.

this is sick. need a multiplayer.

Genuinely interesting, thank you.

This is awesome :) thanks OP

This is really cool, bookmarked it

great game well done i could easily play this for far too long

That was a lot of fun

This is amazing!

This is amazing!

nice game...

Looks really cool, keep going!

Really fun !

Big chess fan here.

This is great!

i played some minutes, cool

Wait until you see my curling rogue like. Spoilerz curling fucking sucks solo.

well done!

Amazing how any time there’s a leaderboard there’s somebody using it to market their thing. I won’t name the one I see currently to avoid rewarding the behavior further (though I now have a negative view of them), but folks seriously: can we just do something fun for once and not see everything as an opportunity to be leveraged?

This is so cool bro