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Show HN: Schmess – chess with no turns; pieces freeze on cooldown after moving
Solo dev here. Schmess is chess with the turn structure removed. Both players move whenever they have a free slot, and every piece freezes on a cooldown after it moves. It's on a half board, with 100+ puzzle stages. If two people played this over a physical board they'd scrape each other's fingers raw - that's roughly the tempo.
Plays in the browser, no signup. 29 stages free, one-time unlock for the rest ($3.99 / Rs 149). No subscription, no ads.
It's the second of a few small-board variants I'm building (halfchess was the first, more coming). Building a chess engine for a game with no turns turned out to be the hard part - I've put the war stories in a comment below.
- navalsaini 2mo ago[flagged]
- evanjrowley 2mo agoI wonder if adding a "dark souls" mode, where each move is delayed by a wind-up (or perhaps slow movement?), might result in more strategic gameplay approaches.
- navalsaini 2mo agoAgreed-adding a wind-up delay would make gameplay significantly more strategic. From an engine and state-space perspective, a "Dark Souls mode" creates a massive challenge. Explosive Search Tree: Because moves overlap in time, evaluating positions via traditional brute-force depth/breadth search becomes nearly impossible. The state space expands exponentially (or infinitely, without cooldowns). Strategy over Calculation: Because an AI or player can't brute-force every micro-timeline, win conditions rely far more on high-level positional control and timing anticipation rather than raw calculation. Endgame Dynamics: Cooldown management would dominate the endgame. It could either make drawing much easier or completely alter fundamental checkmate patterns (like King + Rook vs. King). Great concept to think through!
- navalsaini 2mo ago[dead]
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- navalsaini 2mo agoCorrection - plays in the app (no signup)
- navalsaini 2mo agoCan play it on browser now - https://schmess.com/demo https://schmess.com/demo
- vunderba 2mo agoNice job. There was actually an attempt to build a physical, real-time chess prototype back in 2015 that you might also find interesting, called Dengekisen: Speed Chess. In that version, each piece had its own small cooldown timer that had to expire before you were allowed to move it again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QikOIRs3MTo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QikOIRs3MTo
- navalsaini 2mo agoI love the chessboard design on the table top. I will love to do in schmess chessboards.