Show HN: PawnPush, daily chess bots with unique personalities and play styles
pawnpush.com
I set up PawnPush as a way to have a fun daily chess challenge kind of like Wordle or the other NYT games.
Maybe I'm in the minority, I often enjoy playing character-based chess bots more than live games because finding time to play focused and uninterrupted is difficult and stressful with work and kids.
I've beat all the chess.com bots (at least the ones I can beat at my level), so I was out of challengers. But just playing an engine that plays the same each time and destroys me is boring. So I tried to come up with a way to have different characters to play against each day.
I set up the site so there's a new chess bot to play each day at midnight with a unique name, personality and play style. Based on their backstory, they'll use different openings, prefer different pieces, get flustered more or less, and stuff like that. Plus, I get to have the fun of coming up with dumb ideas for new characters.
It was a fun little project to put together. Let me know if anyone else is into this kind of thing.