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Show HN: Chess-Inspired Roguelike
- mantasu 3mo ago[dead]
- heyarviind2 4mo agoThis is really cool, bookmarked it
- Calgaryp 4mo agoReally fun !
- impendia 3mo agoThis 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.
- bastardo 3mo agoIsn't it pretty obvious? At least I recognized them.
- impendia 3mo agoSince I last looked, at least on my browser the gameboard has been significantly enlarged. I'd say it's now obvious, but previously I mistook a bishop for a pawn.
- TheGRS 3mo agoI 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.
- ecesena 3mo agoI 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!
- akira_dev 3mo agoThis is so cool bro
- explosionpunch 3mo agoThis is really fun and intuitive. Pretty, too. What did you build it in?
- 55555 3mo agoThis is really really awesome
- fsddfsdfssdf 3mo agoWell done, Claude!
- cowboy_henk 3mo agoThere 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 3mo agoYou 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 3mo agoYour 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)
- cowboy_henk 3mo agoAdmittedly some of the auxiliary features were made with Claude's help, but I'd argue that's not what makes this interesting. The game (core loop, sprites, etc) were all made by hand. The passkey feedback is good though, I see a few more people have had issues with it. I'll have a look at fixing it!
- Farseer_ 3mo agoIsn't the audio Chess.com's audio? And performance is _really_ harsh on Firefox, this runs at like 10 fps for some reason.
- foobarqux 3mo agoWhat is Rogue-like about this?
- tweetle_beetle 3mo agoYou'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/ https://j4nw.com/pawnbarian/
- joemi 3mo ago"Rogue-like" is the most over-used term these days. It now has almost no meaning, compared to what it used to mean.
- axus 3mo agoNES-game-with-no-battery-like
- chiply314 3mo agoNormally the term fits very well and there are a lot of rogue likes, in this case its just wrong. You die and loose everything than you have a meta upgrade loop.
- joemi 3mo agoI'm aware of what it means now. It used to have a more specific meaning than just "You die and loose everything than you have a meta upgrade loop". That was part of what it meant but not all. The "Berlin interpretation" is what it used to mean, and most of the stuff that's now called a roguelike was referred to as "roguelite" since it met some of the criteria for roguelike but not all.
- j_4 3mo agothank you for the kind words!
- orsenthil 3mo agoVery nice. Enjoyed playing this. I know Chess, what is Roguelike here ?
- coldcity_again 3mo agoIn 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) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)
- Eric_WVGG 3mo agoyeah I concur Great little arcade game. Not a rogue-like.
- ChessGenome 3mo agoVery 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 3mo agoI think it can be reached through settings, then the question mark. Explanation of the pieces would be nice too!
- rahatkabir 3mo agoi played some minutes, cool
- WillAdams 3mo agoCharming! Reminds me of Alice: https://folklore.org/Alice.html https://folklore.org/Alice.html (which I played manically until I managed _1_ perfect game of --- still have the box/disk....)
- Helloworldboy 3mo ago[dead]
- Doches 3mo agoThere 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_Kingdom/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3856240/Pieces_of_the_Kin...
- selimthegrim 3mo agoSo, Battle Chess 2026?
- Doches 3mo agoYou’ve got me; I was very much a Battle Chess addict once upon a time…
- justinbeaudry 3mo agoThat's awesome! I've been working on nearly this exact same idea as a prototype in Godot. Looks like my work is done! ;-)
- Doches 3mo agoOoh! 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.
- keyle 3mo agoNice this is an actual roguelike
- rockyj 3mo agoLooks great! Gamedev is so cool, being able to create enjoyable, playable worlds and characters must be so satisfying. If you can tell me how to build something like this I will be so grateful.
- suprfnk 3mo ago
- fhn 3mo agono bad but the blue and red characters, I have no idea what they are
- joemi 3mo agoI think those are bishops, and they have different colors based on which color spaces they start on.
- medbar 3mo agoLooks 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
- pjm331 3mo agogreat game well done i could easily play this for far too long
- sandgraham 3mo agoSomeone on the leaderboard got to 118? Would be fun to watch that replay.
- 16 3mo agoThat 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 3mo agoIt was a matter of time I suppose. Would love to see the solver!
- vovavili 3mo agoI would expect no less from Hacker News, good job.
- purple-leafy 3mo agoHaha so clever love it! Must look into a beam solver
- Daviey 3mo agoWell done for scoring 2nd place. :)
- rienbdj 3mo agoWhat is a beam solver? Were you able to rig up the solver to the running game? Curious what this looks like!
- datsci_est_2015 3mo agoAssuming OP means they used beam search on the sub trees of possible moves, which yields some local minimum / maximum in the objective space. Especially useful here because of the sheer multitude of possible moves, and also RNG. Beam search can be googled for useful results, beam solver can not.
- XCSme 3mo agoCan'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 3mo agoImpossible?
- XCSme 3mo agoIt 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.
- mrgoldenbrown 3mo agoI would consider many scenarios impossible. How do you proceed when 2 bishops are on the same diagonal protecting each other? That was what I got after capturing the initial horse.
- NickC25 3mo agoBig chess fan here. This is great!
- docheinestages 3mo agoThis is amazing!
- lxe 3mo agoGenuinely interesting, thank you.
- alexhans 3mo agoFun, responsive and intuitive. Congrats.
- egyptianblue 3mo agoThat was a lot of fun
- octopus143 3mo agowell done!
- addandsubtract 3mo agoThe 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 3mo agoI 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.
- purple-leafy 3mo agoGreat game! Is it a different board each day?
- bbx 3mo agoGreat 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 3mo agoSimply click, don't drag
- reassess_blind 3mo agoThat's not very Product Manager of you.
- rayquinox 3mo agoGood feedback! It should feel better now :) let me know if it still needs work!
- AndreVitorio 3mo agoI tried finding how to follow you on your site… I really enjoyed this and would like to keep up with your work
- ahmedehab_01 3mo agoLooks really cool, keep going!
- amenghra 3mo agoWell done. I think it's deterministic, i.e. playing the same board + same moves again spawns same enemies.
- jerlam 3mo agoInteresting, 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.
- Hugsbox 3mo agoThis is awesome :) thanks OP
- sajithdilshan 3mo agoThe 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
- blackarck 3mo agoI noticed that as well, sometimes you would select another box and it would land on another one dying !
- TheGRS 3mo agoDang, 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 :)
- bastardo 3mo agoThat's fun. I may have missed it when starting: What are the rules of movement for the opponents?
- joshuakcockrell 3mo agoThey have the same movement as their equivalent chess pieces.
- Zebfross 3mo agoFun game! There should be a check mate though, right?
- Chipatama90 3mo agoThis is amazing!
- devdoxxx 3mo agoThis game is fun af man you were on to something
- eig 3mo agoThis 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.
- ngokevin 3mo agoYou can click your own piece and see the move order to see if it's a possibility you'll be moving into a discovered attack. You can sort of predict that pieces will move if they can go from a non-threatening state to a threatening state.
- AgentMasterRace 3mo agoWait until you see my curling rogue like. Spoilerz curling fucking sucks solo.
- kingofmen 3mo agoExcellent 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.
- seabass 3mo agoThis 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.
- mv_d5339e31 3mo ago[dead]
- JRGC1 3mo agothere's a {glitch|feature} where the castle can kill you after another piece moves out of the way, it will...
- foo12bar 3mo agoClick on the queen. It will show the order the pieces move. If one piece blocks another from killing you, and the first piece moves earlier, then the second will be able to move after and kill you.
- airstrike 3mo agowhy does this suggest opening my password app the minute it loads? https://i.imgur.com/MmJYyKG.png https://i.imgur.com/MmJYyKG.png
- uzyn 3mo agoThe site has a hidden webauthn trigger[1], an anti-pattern that automatically logs user in via passkey if it exists. A better approach, IMO, would be requiring user to click "log in". [1]: `<input type="text" autocomplete="username webauthn" style="position:fixed;top:0;left:0;width:1px;height:1px;opacity:0;pointer-events:none" aria-hidden="true" />`
- cowboy_henk 3mo agoJust fixed this, let me know if you run into more issues.
- fogleman 3mo agoLove it. The knights seem much more annoying / powerful than you'd expect.
- erickhill 3mo agoUI 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.
- croes 3mo agoYou can just click where should go, no need for drag and drop
- cowboy_henk 3mo agoThe main reason for adding a daily puzzle (or really the seeded RNG) is that part of the game loop is retrying the same seed to find the best lines for that map. Since all pieces are deterministic, we've found it fun to retry the same map to see if a different line works better. It also adds a competitive/multiplayer element to the game, rather than it just being for single player use. I think both "play styles" make sense, we've just found it more fun to share with friends this way!
- opowell 3mo agoProblem is the hidden information about which pieces will spawn is only revealed through repeated play. Only fix I can think of would be to make this information public.
- Recursing 3mo agoWhat's the threshold at which you remove scores from the leaderboard? There were several valid >100 scores earlier today (some mentioned in other comments here)
- LearnYouALisp 3mo agowdym 'valid', if you can write a script (with engine or access) to solve which is presumably what ppl do
- vladsiu 3mo ago[dead]
- rmunn 3mo agoBefore 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.
- nielsbot 3mo agoI thought it might be similar to this Playdate game, which is a sort of Chess RPG/adventure: https://play.date/games/questy-chess/ https://play.date/games/questy-chess/ Pretty unique and interesting...
- uHuge 3mo agoReplay not working properly on mobile..?
- frisia 3mo agoVery 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.
- Vincenius 3mo agoVery fun game! I really like the idea. Already shared it with my chess group :D
- Forgeties79 3mo agoAmazing 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?
- taffydavid 3mo agoI love this so much
- GL26 3mo agoThis 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/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3509230/Gambonanza/
- handoflixue 3mo agoI was so surprised this wasn't that game! And then the top comment saying "I also built one" also wasn't Gambonanza! There are so many of these, wow - and nicely distinct from each other, too
- shippedbytim 3mo agoThis is pretty fun!!
- wyamichelle 3mo agothis is sick. need a multiplayer.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- davidjhhh 3mo ago[dead]
- melih1im 3mo agonice game...
- niek_pas 3mo agoThis is cool! I personally really dislike having AI on the leaderboard as it feels completely antithetical to human play.
- tunafighter 3mo agoVery nicely done ! I think I have a new addiction now !
- rienbdj 3mo agoCool game. Seeing as this is HN, please can you talk tech stack?
- antfarm 3mo agoAs the random is seeded, I would like an undo/redo button.
- momento 3mo agoThis is great! I would love this even more with a chess clock. 3+2 would be great!
- n4r9 3mo agoThis 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.
- PashaGo 3mo agoYou should add a timer. Bullet chess is fun
- bryanhogan 3mo agoVery 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!
- WenboS 3mo agoReally 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.
- jameshart 3mo agoWhy did you make the player character, who wears a crown and moves like a queen, a prince?
- throwfaraway135 3mo agoMaybe because the son of a queen is a prince?
- RyanOD 3mo agoFun 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.
- sureste 3mo agoI'm hooked. I didn't even know I needed this.
- jjmarr 3mo ago"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-collection https://www.humblebundle.com/games/checkmate-chess-games-col...
- nimih 3mo ago> unclear reasons I think it's pretty obvious, tbh. Traditional roguelikes are turn-based, take place on a square grid, are good vehicles for exploring focused mechanical ideas, and can be fun without much in the way of story or graphic design. All of those features mesh well with the rules of chess, which itself is probably the most widely played game in the world.
- pantsforbirds 3mo agoI 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 :)
- pantsforbirds 3mo agoI started by pulling the game source locally and doing some initial testing with a few solvers. I ended up having Claude make a 1-for-1 perfect sim of the original game using rust with some optimizations. The original engine was able to check around 180 moves/s and the rust port was hitting 2,150 moves/s. After that, I tested a few solvers. Single Player Monte Carlo Tree Search seemed promising, but didn't do as well as I expected. A simple beam search does appear to go infinitely pretty easily.
- mrgoldenbrown 3mo agoWhen you say play perfectly do you mean by exhausting all possibilities? Or is there some way to deduce ahead of time whether the RNG will put you in an impossible situation.
- pantsforbirds 3mo agoThe way the game is seeded, it's 100% deterministic. So if you can scan enough potential moves / second, it's very easy to infinitely play the game at a fast rate. Shockingly, Claude was able to find the exact random generators that the js library uses, list out all of the differences between the languages that might impact the replays (like rounding being treated differently), and include those differences in the simulation. Claud then back-tested on a huge number of games using the original implementation as a golden set generator.
- teo_zero 3mo ago> it's definitely infinite if you play perfectly. Considering that 2 new pieces are spawned for each captured one, if you keep progressing you will exhaust the real estate, sooner or later. The only way to go on infinitely is not capturing, but that means not scoring points. Hardly satisfying, though. For example today's board can be played infinitely by moving between a8 and b7. Zero points, infinite game!
- martini_p 3mo agoWho remembers Archon? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon:_The_Light_and_the_Dark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon:_The_Light_and_the_Dark
- frankfrank13 3mo agoplease add a shareable score!
- dmurvihill 3mo agoVery cool, thanks!
- alexb87 3mo agoWho is the owner, the creator of this nice game ?
- bojanstef 3mo agoThis is addicting, good job
- wallyai 3mo ago[dead]