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

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 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...

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…

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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).

Haha so clever love it! Must look into a beam solver

I would expect no less from Hacker News, good job.

It was a matter of time I suppose. Would love to see the solver!

Great game! Is it a different board each day?

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.

Looks really cool, keep going!

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!

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!

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

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!

Fun, responsive and intuitive. Congrats.

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.

Genuinely interesting, thank you.

This is really really awesome

That was a lot of fun

Big chess fan here.

This is great!

This is amazing!

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

well done!

This is really cool, bookmarked it

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

i played some minutes, cool

Really fun !

This is so cool bro