Show HN: Matle – A Daily Chess Puzzle Inspired by Wordle | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Matle – A Daily Chess Puzzle Inspired by Wordle

matle.io

85 pointsm88m38 comments

Matle[1], a daily puzzle game that combines chess and Wordle mechanics. You have to guess a hidden checkmate.

How it works: 1. You’re given a board with five hidden squares. 2. Guess the pieces in those squares. 3. You must form a checkmate!

Hints work like Wordle: Correct piece & position Correct piece, wrong position ⬜ Wrong piece

[1] http://www.matle.io/

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It's really confusing to me that I drag a piece, I drop it on a square, it stays there, and there's an animation that the piece returns to the bottom. If it stays there, it shouldn't have a "returning" animation. Otherwise, it's an interesting puzzle.

I noticed the same thing.

I guess I was a bit flippant about my guesses and realized I made two guesses that were invalid because they weren't actually checkmates.

IMO those should count as guesses.

I felt like an imposter getting the praise "Wow, you're fast!" and "only two guesses!" when I'd actually submitted 4 guesses... just that two were so bad that the game rejected them outright. lol.

Very cool idea, and very well implemented. My only feedback is that you should clarify whether the solution has to be a valid position that can be reached in a chess game.

Very nice idea. Reminds me a bit of https://www.chessguessr.com/.

Worked pretty well. It was nice that it told me "this is not a mate", I'd have burned through all my tries without that guardrail.

Seems cool, reminds me of this video where top GMs guess the position without seeing the pieces. Some can even name players and the date of the game.

https://youtu.be/_Ntn4jEv7rE?feature=shared

I think this is cool, but you should eliminate the possibility for squares to be empty. This is already significantly harder than Wordle because almost nobody is going to know the positions of games by heart (so you have to randomly guess in many cases). The possibility of blank spaces is just cruel to add on top of that inherent difficulty.

at least on the first one there was really only one way it could have happened under reasonable assumptions (mainly, that the white queen had just been taken). I'm not sure it works very well for the Wordle format, although it is fun as a puzzle otherwise.

Managed to guess it on the first try after realising it looked like a real game. Bit sad to see only one puzzle per day.

Sharing the result also reveils the solution in copied text, maybe remove that so someone could share the exact puzzle without immediatly seeing the solution.

Sharing the result only shows your guesses results, without the actual pieces

At first I thought it would be the typical chess exercise question, just that everybody gets the same one each day, but I like the approach you have. Makes one think differently than usual.

This is actually an interesting take on a chess puzzle, instead of calculate the winning sequence it's asking you to reconstruct it.

Very cool to have to think in the other direction to solve it.

Looks really cool, although way beyond my chess ability. Nice work

The experiment is cool, but after this first attempt I wonder if it's not going to be too easy to guess in just one try lots of times.

Today's puzzle was more difficult in terms of tries

I really liked it. I found it to be quite difficult, but somehow managed to solve the problem in 4 tries. At first I didn't quite realize that you can put opposing pieces on the board so I think I wasted one or two turns. In general, love the concept and execution, but seems like it might have a pretty narrow audience of chess enthusiasts.

Cool! not getting any response from the share result button on firefox (got it on the second try and wanted to brag a bit about it)

Good idea, maybe you can make a game decryption tool like this, like https://wordletoday.cc/, you can try https://wordletoday.cc/

Some hints:

- not every square with a ? needs to be filled

- a piece that's marked as yellow or green may appear more than once (if that's legal)

- you can see your previous guesses by clicking on the guess history squares

- the game shows you pieces that have been eliminated based on their background colour in the pieces list under the board

Fun puzzle! Fyi, does not play well with Brave - experimantal dark mode.

But I think that's probably true of a lot of chess sites. I sort of feel like sites should have a way of flagging themselves as already in dark mode, so that they can be ignored by any dark mode extensions.

I think that this solution is a bit backwards. I think it should be on the extension to detect if the site is already "dark".

Todays matle.io had a few positions that were inconsequential to the mate itself and could be a lot of pieces other than the solution that could be reached through normal game so it's pretty much a guessing game.

Yes, I had to play it the Wordle way, doing a lot of elimination so I can make it in 5 guesses. Maybe tomorrow it will be more like a chess puzzle.

There should be colorblind options. Makes the puzzle quite challenging.

Nice idea!

Here is mine: https://www.solitairle.com/

I tried this, but it doesn’t seem to work in mobile.

And the first one presented to me, I’m pretty sure it is unsolvable. I can’t even find a valid first move.

It does work on mobile,but the instructions are cut off.

And it doesn't play like normal solitaire. You can move any card, no matter what's on top of it. That makes it much easier.

The misclick limit is really annoying on mobile where it's hard to precisely hit things.

That's quite challenging for a first puzzle, though it is a well-known mate. Guessed in 3 tries

Loved it! I'm so so at chess but was able to get it in 3 tries. Nice execution with the UI.

Also, it wasn't immediately obvious that you only get the feedback after a valid checkmate.

A fun idea and great execution. Looking forward to tomorrow's puzzle

I like this! Very creative tool to learn chess mating patterns

Today's puzzle was very cool!

Nice! Will be trying this over the next few days

Incredible. Loved it!

Sorry to say, but this is very unintuitive and hard.

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