Chess, but moves are simultaneous | Hacker News Reader

Chess, but moves are simultaneous

chess2.fun

183 pointsgershy109 comments

Seems like it got the hug of death from many users - few interesting quirks I saw while it was still running:

* You need to actually capture the king to win. Check/Checkmate does not apply here

* You can't move the same piece twice in a row (I think)

* You can actually skip a turn - This is somehow more strategic than it sounds, but I'm not sure how to use it - maybe just wait with your "venus flytrap" and then capture the pieces?

You're pretty much dead-on! (There's a lil "how to play" section on the site!)

The last bullet point reminds me of the description from a game in China Miéville's Kraken.

> The “universal leaper” was usually thought the most powerful piece, he read, as it could go from where it was to any other square on the board. But it was not. Kraken was... It could move to any square including the one it was already on. Anywhere including nowhere.

Or the Lion from Chu Shogi, which steps twice and can thus land on its starting square.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zugzwang

Any position like this would essentially be drawn if both sides could skip their move

Check/Checkmate does not apply here

Good. The entire check system is a pointless bolt-on esotericism. Not being able to place your king in check has never improved a single game of chess.

How would it make anything better? If you could, you'd just be voluntarily losing the game.

In the off chance your opponent misses it maybe?

Yeah, that's you screwing up and losing, or trying to bluff your opponent into not noticing. Both should be allowed.

What about the rule that the king is not allowed to castle if one of the squares moved over by the king is under attack? If you allow the king to be placed in check then you surely would also allow the king to step over squares attacked by opponents peaces? But this would change the game in the sense that it will not be equivalent to chess any more.

Even tho I can't see the site, I love the idea of rule changes. We live in a golden age my friends; computers, automation and a massive online player base opens up so many opportunities to tweak the rules of existing games and see what falls out.

Maybe my rule change idea has already been implemented, but, other than building it myself, is there a way to play / automate chess / checkerboards of arbitrary sizes? Bigger / smaller boards, odd numbers of tiles, rectangles, etc. How about adding and removing pieces, an extra rank of pawns for example. Letting it run / learn for a million games or so and see what comes out.

Please let me know if yous guys have seen something similar.

Pychess.org is a Lichess clone dedicated to variants (both traditional chess-like variants and newly invented ones)

Just played my first game; the dynamics here didn't take long to get used to and it's brilliantly fun to play. Bugs aside, at least.

A few people pointed out that the king and queen are in the wrong positions, but if you think it through, you'll also note that this is entirely cosmetic when both players move at once. If anything, it might be easier to fix this by swapping the assets and mirroring the board rather than swapping white and black, at least depending on how the game's written.

It is purely cosmetic in that the white and black pieces are wrong, but it's also kind of important.

Played a game, turns out I didn't castle--just moved my queen for no reason.

I have not played this specific instance because it is being HN-hugged to death, but I've played this rule change before--there used to be a website that called it "xymyx". It was interesting because you could move pawns diagonally by attempting to capture a pawn that moved that same turn. Lots of other cute little side effects.

I hadn't known of xymyx when I made chess2! Xymyx looks pretty interesting too - I wanted to attempt to make an interesting variation on chess with minimal changes to the classic rules!

Kung Fu Chess had an opening everyone used of every pawn moving forward and diagonal.

Hope you don't break my site :)

too bad. it's broken.

Seems broken, is this a simultaneous move interface for chess? sounds interesting!

That already exists: https://www.kfchess.com/

It's not the same!

I believe you :) Just pointing out what the parent described.

This is realtime chess with cooldown, OP seems to have made the "lock in a move for simultaneous execution" (nobody seems to have seen it).

Yes, this is what I was asking about. A lock-in move mechanism.

kjchess is pretty fun, just tried!

Aaaaand it's down.

Oy vey... working on it

Hurry gershy!

In the meanwhile, others might be interested in visualizing a Reddit (and HN) hug of death:

https://www.tylermw.com/visualizing-a-reddit-hug-of-death-an...

This is a great article, thanks! :)

eyes on the road, gershy! :P

Looking forward to checking your site later gershy (and placing this comment as a reminder :P ), but I'll admit I'm glad in a horrible sort of way that it means I was able to see this article.

I have to point out that this was an entirely predictable outcome of submitting it to hacker news…

It is possible to survive HN traffic.

Even my dedicated Apache server threw errors for static pages every now and then, when serving gigabytes per hour.

It’s trivial to survive HN traffic with a static site (assuming you know in advance that the site needs to be prepared for HN traffic) - just stick it behind a CDN.

I found HN front-page to still be less than about 1 user action per second. Ie. Pageload.

That means if your site loads fast, you typically won't ever be serving more than a single user at once, so unless you're serving it on a burstable CPU and you run out of burst capacity, you should be fine.

Yeah, my site which is hosted on fly.io's smallest VM with 256MB RAM and only part of a CPU core was on the HN front page the other day and I was surprised to see that it barely even registered the resource usage: consuming just 50MB RAM with a 0.2 load average.

It is a fairly simple webpage, and it's rendered in Rust so it's probably more efficient than most. And perhaps it didn't get as much traffic as other things on the front page, but I was still expecting worse given how much some sites seem to struggle.

I am quite opposed to CDNs.

https://danuker.go.ro/how-to-protect-your-personal-data.html

Then use a performant webserver like Nginx and beef up your server hardware.

I host my static sites on a single cheap VPS from Scaleway, and it handles frontpage HN traffic just fine without CDNs.

> It’s trivial to survive HN traffic with a static site

It’s fairly trivial to survive HN traffic, full stop. I’ve seen the RPS live from several “#1 on homepage” posts with hundreds of comments (let alone upvotes) and as another commenter stated, it’s at most single digit requests per second.

Edit to add:

I’m not judging harshly hobby projects for not surviving it, it was a hobby project after all, but that doesn’t change the fact it’s fairly trivial to handle if you set that as a goal.

Isn't Apache infamously slow? If you're serving a lot of traffic I'd consider switching to a faster server (nginx or similar).

> If you're serving a lot of traffic I'd consider switching to a faster server

I don't think anyone with a small personal site should spend too much time planning for that single, improbable, day when traffic might increase by several orders of magnitude.

With most hosts I've had, that type of increase would just trigger DDOS protection and/or take down the site with its itty bitty quota limits.

1. host website with AWS

2. Get featured on HN

3. Suddenly Jeff can hire all the folks back he's laying off, from the bandwidth proceeds.

Not with hub and spoke sockets, it aint (not easy at least).

Only if it's sufficiently successful.

It was a learning experience :')

Can't access it, but what's the server running?

A framework I wrote from scratch! (https://github.com/Gershy/hut in case you're curious)

still on the front page, good luck with that haha

Doesn't seem to be working at the moment. Console shows this error:

  An Error lacking a "stack" property:
  Form: TypeError
  Desc: TypeError: NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource.
  Keys: [ fileName, lineNumber, columnNumber, message ] html.room:49:9
  Uncaught (in promise) TypeError: NetworkError when attempting to fetch resource.
  Firefox kan geen verbinding maken met de server op wss://chess2.fun/?trn=sync&hutId=000000LFCzgqdaBb.

Yeah, server completely fell over when we all slashdotted it. This is the sort of thing to bookmark and then try to remember it again tomorrow.

I made a whatsapp group with a friend then kicked them so it's only me, then I message myself all the links I need to check out after work. Works relatively well

@gershy: Very fun, thanks. Now that the rush is past, are you still reading Hacker News comments? Is this the right place to give feedback and suggestions?

I just now have been hoping for a match, and the display says "Two players matching" which implies to me someone is out there besides me waiting to play", but I never got matched. Does this seem like a bug?

Also, it would be handy to have a chime when a match occurs. I'm willing to have my 'matching' state be long term in a separate tab, as I surf.

Unfortunately I can't play due to the HN hug of death, but I just want to say that this is a great idea. Chess is a wonderful game on its own, but having a synchronous element to the game and information asymmetry seems like it could add a lot of depth.

I played some 10 games or so, before I couldn't reach the server anymore.

Pretty fun, I like it! I'm going to try it tomorrow with a friend of mine that's about my level and see how it goes, hopefully those practice games will serve me well ;)

What happens if both players choose the same open space for their move?

Both dead!

Or a d20 roll to see who survives based on how many times you have upgraded your units!

Maybe in chess3 :D

I assume it works just like Diplomacy. Meaning they both bounce. Unless one of them has support to move by another piece, and that piece itself is not under attack.

I don't think that is possible given the potential moves and the board.

> I don't think that is possible

I think you mean "likely" rather than "possible". It's definitely possible. I had it happen.

I tried it, queen and bishop to the same square, they captured each other and disappeared off the board!

Related concept: Kung Fu Chess, which is truly real-time and simultaneous: https://www.kfchess.com/

Oh wow, it has all the sound effects of the original!

I remember seeing this implemented a ways back called RTChess

http://rtchess.deapthoughts.com/

It looks like quite a different concept! Here neither player can move again until they've both submitted the current move.

So how does castling, En Passant, and moving one's king into a checked (but wouldn't have been checked, but for the move of the opponent) position work?

There's no concept of being in check - king needs to be captured instead! Less dignity for the king this way :( but what can you do

I was very confused when I was in check mate, but the other player didn't capture my king for some reason.... so in the end I won. Didn't expect that. They probably just didn't see the check mate even if it was obvious to me!

A clever way to escape checkmate is to move your king towards or away from the piece that placed the king in check (as long as your new square doesn't also place you in check by a different piece you should be able to avoid the initial capture and still be safe since they won't be able to move this same piece right away).

https://www.reddit.com/r/AnarchyChess/

aaand its dead:

   > curl -v chess2.fun
   *   Trying 159.203.9.162:80...
   * Connected to chess2.fun (159.203.9.162) port 80 (#0)
   > GET / HTTP/1.1
   > Host: chess2.fun
   > User-Agent: curl/7.84.0
   > Accept: */*
   >
   * Recv failure: Connection was reset

I just played a match and it said "Checkmate" when there was no checkmate, maybe a bug? https://cloud.arent.net/s/osQT8eMtPXHeBWQ

Your opponent may have disconnected, giving you the win by default! I've gotta make that wording a bit clearer... right now it always says "checkmate".

Ah yes this seems likely since they just blundered their queen. Great stuff, thank you for sharing this project. I'll bookmark for later :)

I think the squares of the board are the wrong way round...

Oh shucks they are!! You fiends are about to crash my site again - that will be a wonderful opportunity to fix my squares up. Ty my friend.

Yes...I started playing and then realised none of the moves work...then the other player left the game but there was no way of me knowing they had left.

Glad it's working for some of you, and sorry for the bugs and instability! Should only get more stable with time as I work on it...

I thought it was just for the first move, but I guess that wouldn't make sense. Its an odd game, but it could be interesting.

Damn I want to play and it appears very dead.

Very fun! Well done. Played 3 games. Fun that pieces taking each other just change places.

Noone mentioning kung-fu chess and bughouse chess, those are actually good games.

Why is the board setup backwards? Very cool idea though, and fun.

It was backwards because I am notttt too smart! (Makes me so happy to hear you had fun)

None of my pawns are rendered on the screen (playing as black)

cool concept, but as another commenter mentioned, the squares aren't set up correctly. the white king should be on the right of the queen

As true as this is, it's also immaterial to the game itself. Since both white and black move simultaneously, the only difference in gameplay is literally which side your king and queen start on.

So yeah, it should be fixed, but it's also a purely cosmetic bug. And I imagine it's probably safer to fix it by swapping the assets and flipping the board rather than actually remapping white and black pieces.

Just hangs with “Entering chess2...”

sooo cool, gg, guy i played. I really thought i had it lol.

Good fun!

Can't try it because it is being hn-hugged to death.

So, I will just comment that I've really enjoyed chess.com's fog of war variation. Basically, you can only see the squares where you are legally allowed to move, adding a whole different level of strategy to the game.

I wish lichess could add it!

lichess is open source, feel free to add it

Yea, I get that but I doubt it's a trivial task!

IIRC the Lichess dev isn't too fond of random people adding big new features. They tend to be a bit sloppily written (by people who don't have as much Scala experience as other languages) and then people ditch the project and don't maintain what they built.

And he said it's really difficult to remove features. The smallest most obscure thing will have at least one user. Removing a game mode or big feature makes loads of people angry. But he hasn't got time to maintain the millions of things people submit and then never touch again.

"Neither player moves first" The way that's phrased makes it sound like no one ever gets to take a turn, but they actually meant that players move at the same time.

It’s Mutually Assured Chess.

It’s a curious game. The only way to win is not to play.

In this case though;

It’s a curious game. The only way is not to play

The strange description is a good way to attract attention.

aka clickbait

Strong disagree: It being clickbait or not is dependent on 2 things:

1. The accuracy or embellishment of the headline

2. The quality of the content behind the headline

This does not seem to strongly violate either condition.

Title suggestion: "Chess, but moves are simultaneous"

You are kind and smart

(Originally the title was "Chess, but neither player moves first")

Site is immediately hugged to death.

Ah, you start with the boxing round then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_boxing

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