Chess puzzle, but you are what you capture
echochess.com
echochess.com
Spent the past year iterating on it and honing it into a daily format. So many more improvements to come. Lmk if you have any questions or suggestions. Would love to hear your thoughts.
-How to play: You play White (it's always your turn). You become any piece you capture, and your goal is to clear the board in the fewest number of moves. You can capture your own pieces too. No castling, promotions, or en passant.
-What's Zen Mode: a procedurally generated infinite mode that uses an ML model I built. Happy to answer any questions on that.
I guess I also want to ask: are you making money on this? Like, how do you have this much time to spend on this project?
You know what would be cool: flashing a trivia fact beneath the board with each move. Maybe a chess history fact?
EDIT: Man - epic is no joke!...
LOVE this.
and yes, some of the daily epic puzzles can be brutal :)
I think it might help to start with a certain strategy in mind. were you able to hone in on a strategy for that one yet? lmk if I can help
This would make a really cool watch-face for idling....
EDit: on second thought...
I cannot figure out how to kill the black pawn above me..
https://i.imgur.com/bGJUFu8.png
https://i.imgur.com/nOVjAYW.png
(A replay button would be great)
https://i.imgur.com/SVoXsjb.png
-
Yes, on hint, plz
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I keep them both useful until I have to capture the queen - so one turns into the queen, and if I send a bishop to take the knight its stuck there because if I take the knight then with the queen - the queen becomes the knight... same with the pawn.
Here's a hint: can you try to keep both your white pieces useful after going down from the top section?
see if there's 2 bishops on a white square for example.
*SPOILER ALERT*
A good approach for clearing long columns of pawns in echo chess is usually to try to take the very first bottom pawn and to 'climb' up the column by successively taking one pawn at a time. If you can find a way to start from a pawn that's located as low as possible on a given column's side, it'll likely help in clearing a whole swatch of the board without leaving any extra pawns 'orphaned' on their own. Let me know if that makes sense and if you'd like me to provide anohter hint!
But still needs the first suggestion:
"Thank you for subscribing to CHESS FACTS!"
nd it plays a random chess trivia fact with each move - but they are fake:
Did you know that the reason the King can only move one space? Because Henry the VIII had gout and couldt walk fast!
The queen can move so many spaces because old castles had escape tunnels for the queen and her maides so they wouldnt get raped when the castle was stormed!
you can actually install it locally on any device straight from there too (e.g. on iOS if you're in Safari you can tap share > add to Home Screen)
This might be a good idea because it's typical that web games like this usually don't play music or even sounds. It's kind of a context thing? If in a game app, music and sounds are expected... if it's a website, not so much.
This would also help reduce the fairly large download that makes the game a bit chonky to load.
Thanks for taking the time to respond to feedback!
Plus I for one liked the cute sound effects and didn't even think about the music as something unusual.
This seems similar to a game useChess - https://use-chess.fall-2023.reactjam.com - I played last year. Would you happen to be the same author?
The only feedback I'd add is to make it more clear that the red squares are just inaccessible, because that wasn't at all clear at first. When failing to move a piece, the red squares together with a non-standard mechanic makes it unclear what you're missing.
Probably just some text at the top of the puzzle or a better UI cue would be enough.
The pull to refresh has been very broken since forever. Apparently they enabled it by default in the latest version because it was "very stable" but I'm not so sure...
If you just want to send a code, and you want to tie it to some kind of identifier token, take the less-than-a-day that it takes to add normal "trusted third party" authentication, where you ask google/facebook/github/whoever to confirm this is a real person.
And then you don't have to save any personal information, either (which laws both in the US and EU say includes phone numbers), which means you also can't LEAK personal information when someone inevitably gets into your database.
That makes me really suspicious about what you do with the phone number.
Very helpful feedback, will get this right. Thanks again for the feedback guys.
Edit: ah, you mean in zen mode - true, it’s there. Then again, the timer is still running, which I find annoying.
Many players who love this mode are also fans of blitz chess. Curious if you're into rapid/bullet modes in general or that's not really your cup of tea.
1. The basic rules don't state that there is no promotion.
2. I would like to know a kind of "par" value per puzzle. Either the best it can be solved in or the average or something like that. This would help in finding an optimal-ish solution.
"Only 12 moves! Best is 10"
Granted this will be displayed in a much better way over time.
I don't think I saw the #moves the first time, or at the very least the lack of a try again/try for optimal/try other puzzles button made the page seem terminal. I imagine the share button is prominently there to go for virality.
https://wafflegame.net/archive is a game that is very similar to yours. I like their layout. The archive with a score per puzzle and aggregated information at the top is fairly addicting.
Waffle puzzles give you a maximum number of moves, 5 more than optimal. I like that more than infinite moves with try again. I think "failing" gives attempting more meaning.
Looking forward to tomorrow's daily!
Had to run around switching servers asap but thankfully the rest of the puzzles and Zen Mode stayed intact and playable.
Everything is back up and running right now on https://echochess.com/
If you're still experiencing a missing puzzle situation, please try clearing your browser cache and reloading if possible (if you had installed the app locally on your device, re-installing should do the same).
If any issue remains, please let me know and I'll be fixing it ASAP. Will also push a new release very soon with many of the early fixes identified by the community.
Thank you all for bringing so much love and passion to echo chess. How'd you do on the Classic today? :)
Really appreciate the callout. Very fair point. Will change this for sure to email/username or similar. Will keep improving on the game thanks to you guys' input. Thanks!
Sorry
(InputXY)
(Control
(INIT $Cursor 1 1 0 0 Create =@cur)
)
($Cursor
Player
(Image "Cursor0" "Cursor1")
(DefaultImage ())
(Density -10)
(CREATE LOOP 0 1 50 Animate)
)
($Tile
(Image "Tile0" "Tile1")
(Density 10)
(INIT Loc + 1 band =Image)
(CLICK @cur ,ObjBelow #Move Loc ,Send . 1)
)
($White
Input
(Image "P" "N" "B" "R" "Q" "K")
(CLICK @cur Loc ,MoveTo)
(#Move
,:movable
if
Arg1 Arg2 MoveTo .
Arg3 if
From ,Image =Image
From ,Destroy .
(=P $Black) lnot if WinLevel then
then
@cur Loc ,MoveTo .
then
)
(:movable
Image (case
(0 :pawn)
(1 :knight)
(2 :bishop)
(3 :rook)
(4 :queen)
(5 :king)
)
)
(:pawn Yloc Arg2 1 + eq Xloc Arg1 Delta Arg3 eq land)
(:knight Xloc Arg1 Delta dup * Yloc Arg2 Delta dup * + 5 eq)
(:bishop Xloc Arg1 Delta Yloc Arg2 Delta eq if =:queen else 0 then)
(:rook Xloc Arg1 Delta Yloc Arg2 Delta land if 0 else =:queen then)
(:queen From Seek =%d Loc begin %d NewXY over over ObjTopAt dup From eq if . . ret then ,Class $Tile ne until . . 0)
(:king From Chebyshev 1 eq)
(#Destroy
From Self ne if
From #Move Loc 1 ,SendEx .
then
Destroyed lnot
)
('D
@cur Coloc if
$White #Destroy Loc BroadcastAnd .
then
)
)
($Black
(Image "PB" "NB" "BB" "RB" "QB" "KB")
(CLICK @cur ,ObjBelow #Move Loc 1 ,SendEx . 1)
)
Still trying to hone in on the ideal number of lives for each mode. Some puzzles definitely would need more lives than others. For example: https://echochess.com/game.html?game_mode=DAILY&level_type=E...
Granted, the time complexity of doing so is really high. But from an emotional standpoint, beta testers seemed to appreciate more often than not the adrenaline rush that comes with a low number of remaining lives and the renewed focus that comes with it. One playtester mentioned that they only felt they got to the 'flow' state and finally resolved an exceptionally hard level when they were calculating every move on their last life.
If you think about the chess board in abstracted terms, you can actually map an echo chess puzzle to a graph theory problem. First, you disregard any empty squares, and you consider each piece-square as a node, with its neighboring nodes being any node that can be reached from this node using any number of >0 valid moves without reaching any interim node on the way.
Using that process, you can now convert an entire echo chess board into a graph where each chess piece is a single node. Now you can ask the question, "what is the objective of solving an echo chess puzzle in terms of this graph?"
It turns out that since the goal is to clear all pieces of the board, and in order to clear pieces we have to reach their corresponding square, then in graph terms our goal is to visit every node. However we can only visit every node once at most (because once a piece is captured, it is taken off the board).
In other words, an echo chess puzzle is the same as "visiting every node on the graph exactly once". That's the HPP which is NP-complete, and if you're looking for the shortest HPP, it's even NP-hard.
TL;DR: brute-forcing as a player is not the optimal strategy.
I have the feeling this would be even much better without the red squares and with a regular sized board. And that it would feel more logical and interesting to me.
Or is it impossible to create challenging puzzles without the red squares?
Here are some screenshots:
https://i.imgur.com/ZJ36abU.png
Fixing this asap. Thanks for reporting ddejohn!
Echo Chess: The Quest for Solvability - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37327895 - Aug 2023 (106 comments)
One nit: I had to (or at least was able to) capture the king in the puzzle, which just feels wrong somehow.
Would be great if normal chess rules on checks could still apply, but probably make it too complicated?
Would be nice if there was an email textbox for a mailing list to be notified when it's ready so I don't forget about it
ECHO CHESS Mar 25 (C)
♟
0:27 sec 1/8 tries 14 moves
ECHO CHESS Mar 25 (E)
1:31 sec 1/8 tries 15 moves
0:18 sec 1/8 tries 13 moves
2:09 sec 6/8 tries 21 moves
any ideas how to improve that in terms of text or visuals for further clarity?
Looks super innocent but has already stumped a GM. Happy to give hints if you'd like. gl :)
♟
2:26 sec 1/8 tries 14 moves
Fun little logic puzzles for sure. Nice job!
edit: HN stripped the emoji but I did solve it, lol
ECHO CHESS Mar 26 (C)
♟
0:21 sec 2/8 tries 12 moves
ECHO CHESS Mar 22 (C)
♟
0:25 sec 1/8 tries 5 moves
Edit: it's definitely the wrong one, from poking around the site out of confusion it turns out you have to be logged in to access previous days' puzzles - but the game page itself does absolutely nothing to tell you this and just loads today's puzzle if you open an archive link.
I don't exactly feel like handing over my phone number just to play a puzzle game. Bummer, I guess.
is the background music inspired by "We are the robots"?