Show HN: Chess-Inspired Roguelike | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Chess-Inspired Roguelike

princechazz.com

433 pointscowboy_henk149 comments

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...

So, Battle Chess 2026?

You’ve got me; I was very much a Battle Chess addict once upon a time…

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.

Nice this is an actual roguelike

Looks great! Gamedev is so cool, being able to create enjoyable, playable worlds and characters must be so satisfying. If you can tell me how to build something like this I will be so grateful.

It's really not that hard. There's a lot to learn, but it's doable.

Start here: https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/getting_started/intro...

Or if you're impatient like me you click "Your first 2D game" or "Your first 3D game" in the left bar (whichever you prefer) and go through that -- and skipping back to the intro/step by step when you don't understand something.

By the end of that you'll have made your first game.

From there you just do something extra to it. Mix it up. Start a new project with a different (small) idea. Build small projects until small becomes medium becomes large.

Just like learning anything else, really.

I've made games in Löve and with straight Python and it's always a lot of fun...though challenging at times. Where I tend to struggle is with the overall game structure. Without being an actual professional programmer (nevermind a game programmer), I'm always wrestling with how to design the code structure in a way that is logical and professional. Leveraging common game design patterns isn't at all straight forward for a person like me.

Here are two resources I found quite helpful...

https://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/

https://refactoring.guru/design-patterns

GoG, pls.

That's up to GoG; I've submitted every game I've released to them and it's like talking into the void, never a response. They're a delight as a customer, but kind of half-assed as a platform (at least if you're a self-published indie).

Ah, really? I had no idea! Very surprising too, since they've made their reputation as an indie+abandonware promoter.

Though, to be fair, I haven't seen your game in the Dreamlist [0] or Community Wishlist [1] pages either. You could at least add it and try promote it a bit there to help GoG gauge interest?

[0] https://www.gog.com/dreamlist [1] https://www.gog.com/wishlist

Wishlisted! Looks great

same, I'll definitely pay for that

This is highly parasitic: someone does a Show HN about their hobby project, and then you come and snap on to it like a leech with your to-be-paid-for completely unrelated game demo.

I find this kind of behaviour disgusting. Why don't you do a Show HN on your own?

> completely unrelated

They are both chess-inspired and roguelike.

IMHO this is a completely normal "hey I've been doing something similar" response. Why are you so aggressive about it?

"Chess-related roguelike" is a an very crowded genre for unclear reasons and it's difficult to stick out.

So far I've played Shotgun Queen and Pawnbarian. There's also Ouroboros King, Demoncrawl, The Rookery, Passant, Chess Survivors, Gambonanza, Mind over Monarchy, and many more.

I've not played as many (games in said genre) as you, jjmarr. And so, if you don't mind indulging me... I've an idea for a game that perhaps you'd be able to tell me if it's something you've already seen in play.

The mechanic is fairly simple for this board game (not computer/video): A standard chessboard and chess pieces are used, with a custom deck of cards for each player. Before moving any pieces, a card is revealed that effects enhancements/restrictions/story/etc. The selling point would be banking on the creativity of the deck, of course. If there is anybody that could run with this idea (if in fact original, which I doubt) before I do, I'd love to hear about it! ♟

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

That's not very Product Manager of you.

Good feedback! It should feel better now :) let me know if it still needs work!

I tried finding how to follow you on your site… I really enjoyed this and would like to keep up with your work

"Chess-related roguelike" is a an very crowded genre for unclear reasons and it's difficult to stick out.

So far I've played Shotgun Queen and Pawnbarian. There's also Ouroboros King, Demoncrawl, The Rookery, Passant, Chess Survivors, Gambonanza, Mind over Monarchy, and many more.

There was even a Humble Bundle for mostly Chess-inspired indie roguelikes.

https://www.humblebundle.com/games/checkmate-chess-games-col...

> unclear reasons

I think it's pretty obvious, tbh. Traditional roguelikes are turn-based, take place on a square grid, are good vehicles for exploring focused mechanical ideas, and can be fun without much in the way of story or graphic design. All of those features mesh well with the rules of chess, which itself is probably the most widely played game in the world.

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.

I would consider many scenarios impossible. How do you proceed when 2 bishops are on the same diagonal protecting each other? That was what I got after capturing the initial horse.

Dang, that's really fun! I think its solid all-around and no notes on the core game loop.

If you want to make it more accessible to folks like myself who stink at chess, I'd recommend adding some sort of power-ups so that you can take multiple pieces, jump over obstacles, or freeze enemies in place. And with that you probably have a great little game to sell on Steam :)

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.

Isn't it pretty obvious? At least I recognized them.

Since I last looked, at least on my browser the gameboard has been significantly enlarged.

I'd say it's now obvious, but previously I mistook a bishop for a pawn.

I think it makes a pretty good assumption on understanding core chess rules, but yea that would be nice. The thing that did trip me up at first was not realizing the red and blue bishops were the same piece, I was wondering if I was missing something.

As the random is seeded, I would like an undo/redo button.

Before clicking on the link I thought this was going to be about Gambonanza, a game I've seen some people play on Youtube (on videos that I think were sponsored by the developer of the game, but I don't actually know). Haven't played Gambonanza but from what I can tell you are trying to capture all the rival pieces, you get a coin for each piece you capture, and when you succeed you can spend those coins to buy new pieces or give your pieces new powers (like a shield that protects a piece from the first time it would have been captured). So although it starts out with rules quite like chess (except not totally, e.g. you can have multiple kings and you don't lose until all your pieces are captured, so you can let your king be captured and win with your remaining rook), it can eventually evolve into something quite weird (a king that can also move like a knight, or a rook with protection from being captured, or a "golden" square on the board that if you capture an enemy on that square, you earn 2 or 3 coins instead of just 1).

Actually, Gambonanza kind of reminds me of Balatro in that way: start out with rules resembling the standard game, end up with some very weird combinations. Not really my cup of tea, but might be of interest to others.

UI drag/drop is a little clunky at times, but I love the overall vibe. Doesn’t really feel like a daily game, though. Feels more like it is being shoehorned into that model rather than just being a solo Game Game (like Tetris).

What I mean is as a player, I'll likely not notice the difference in a Friday puzzle vs a Thursday puzzle. And I can replay to my hearts content anyway. So why not simply randomize the board on each replay? Which I'd do anyway.

You can just click where should go, no need for drag and drop

The main reason for adding a daily puzzle (or really the seeded RNG) is that part of the game loop is retrying the same seed to find the best lines for that map. Since all pieces are deterministic, we've found it fun to retry the same map to see if a different line works better. It also adds a competitive/multiplayer element to the game, rather than it just being for single player use.

I think both "play styles" make sense, we've just found it more fun to share with friends this way!

Problem is the hidden information about which pieces will spawn is only revealed through repeated play.

Only fix I can think of would be to make this information public.

What's the threshold at which you remove scores from the leaderboard? There were several valid >100 scores earlier today (some mentioned in other comments here)

wdym 'valid', if you can write a script (with engine or access) to solve which is presumably what ppl do

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....)

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

Oh, I see that now. That makes it so much more interesting as a puzzle. I'll have to try again with that in mind. Got up near 20 but couldn't get past that. Played for like 45 minutes. Super fun!

This is a great puzzle game. I think it actually teaches the concept of "piece coordination" in chess very well.

One suggestion is to have all enemy pieces move simultaneously. I expected that the losing condition is that I am threatened and there are no unthreatened squares to move (checkmate).

However, since the opponents move one-at-a-time, I found that even if I moved to a safe square, sometimes I could be both threatened and captured in the same move! Which is somewhat different from normal chess, since now you have to consider the possible orders in which the opponents move. So even moving to unthreatened squares could be a game over.

You can click your own piece and see the move order to see if it's a possibility you'll be moving into a discovered attack. You can sort of predict that pieces will move if they can go from a non-threatening state to a threatening state.

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

Normally the term fits very well and there are a lot of rogue likes, in this case its just wrong.

You die and loose everything than you have a meta upgrade loop.

I'm aware of what it means now. It used to have a more specific meaning than just "You die and loose everything than you have a meta upgrade loop". That was part of what it meant but not all. The "Berlin interpretation" is what it used to mean, and most of the stuff that's now called a roguelike was referred to as "roguelite" since it met some of the criteria for roguelike but not all.

thank you for the kind words!

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).

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

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

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

Well done for scoring 2nd place. :)

What is a beam solver?

Were you able to rig up the solver to the running game?

Curious what this looks like!

Assuming OP means they used beam search on the sub trees of possible moves, which yields some local minimum / maximum in the objective space. Especially useful here because of the sheer multitude of possible moves, and also RNG.

Beam search can be googled for useful results, beam solver can not.

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

Excellent work, very nice!

One tiny UI nitpick: I found the squares' hitboxes to be unintuitively small, requiring more-than-expected precision to get Chazz to land in the square I wanted. (I was initially confused about whether I was making an illegal move.) You might want to either increase the size of the squares, or make the "this square is the target" indicator more obvious.

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.

Its still not rogue like without a meta upgrade loop.

yeah I concur

Great little arcade game. Not a rogue-like.

This is very satisfying to play. Saw this game on steam that seems close in the « Rogue Like Chess » concept : https://store.steampowered.com/app/3509230/Gambonanza/

I was so surprised this wasn't that game! And then the top comment saying "I also built one" also wasn't Gambonanza!

There are so many of these, wow - and nicely distinct from each other, too

This is awesome! I'd appreciate being able to bring up a primer on the rules - perhaps a reiteration of what it says at the start plus a list of pieces and their moves, and maybe a brief description of what strategy the pieces apply when they move.

I had a lot of fun playing the game. I also made a local solver to see how far you can theoretically get, and it's definitely infinite if you play perfectly. Working on the local sim / solver was almost as fun as playing the game :)

I started by pulling the game source locally and doing some initial testing with a few solvers. I ended up having Claude make a 1-for-1 perfect sim of the original game using rust with some optimizations. The original engine was able to check around 180 moves/s and the rust port was hitting 2,150 moves/s.

After that, I tested a few solvers. Single Player Monte Carlo Tree Search seemed promising, but didn't do as well as I expected. A simple beam search does appear to go infinitely pretty easily.

When you say play perfectly do you mean by exhausting all possibilities? Or is there some way to deduce ahead of time whether the RNG will put you in an impossible situation.

The way the game is seeded, it's 100% deterministic. So if you can scan enough potential moves / second, it's very easy to infinitely play the game at a fast rate.

Shockingly, Claude was able to find the exact random generators that the js library uses, list out all of the differences between the languages that might impact the replays (like rounding being treated differently), and include those differences in the simulation. Claud then back-tested on a huge number of games using the original implementation as a golden set generator.

> it's definitely infinite if you play perfectly.

Considering that 2 new pieces are spawned for each captured one, if you keep progressing you will exhaust the real estate, sooner or later. The only way to go on infinitely is not capturing, but that means not scoring points. Hardly satisfying, though.

For example today's board can be played infinitely by moving between a8 and b7. Zero points, infinite game!

Ah yes, I specifically mean you can keep earning points infinitely. After the board is full, it resets the game, and you get points for each piece on the board. I usually stop the simulation after it clears the board 10 times or so.

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

Your passkey login doesn't even work. I think the nature of Claude usage here goes a bit beyond "some polish".

(For reference, signing back in with a passkey seems to be impossible even after successfully creating an account with one. Every time you sign in it attempts to save a new passkey right after asking for the old one)

Admittedly some of the auxiliary features were made with Claude's help, but I'd argue that's not what makes this interesting. The game (core loop, sprites, etc) were all made by hand.

The passkey feedback is good though, I see a few more people have had issues with it. I'll have a look at fixing it!

Isn't the audio Chess.com's audio? And performance is _really_ harsh on Firefox, this runs at like 10 fps for some reason.

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!

Very cool idea! More of an arcade game though than a roguelike, but very enjoyable. One nit i have: it seems like the seed is fixed? where units spawn every turn.

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!

This is so fun! It would be cool to reuse the replay functionality in order to see how the top scorers managed to get such good scores.

Why did you make the player character, who wears a crown and moves like a queen, a prince?

Maybe because the son of a queen is a prince?

Really neat idea. I like how the chess constraints make the choices feel readable without making it feel like regular chess.

Took me a minute to understand what was going on, but after that it clicked. Would be fun to see more piece-inspired mechanics added over time.

I thought it might be similar to this Playdate game, which is a sort of Chess RPG/adventure:

https://play.date/games/questy-chess/

Pretty unique and interesting...

Who remembers Archon? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon:_The_Light_and_the_Dark

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.

Fun game! And the subtle animation effects are great.

One suggestion...it's unclear to me why I would sign up. Maybe offer a few details so I know why I would sign up for this.

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.

Very nicely done ! I think I have a new addiction now !

Very cool!

Do you have any content on how you built it? I also enjoy making web-based games and would love to learn about other people's processes!

The game is quite great, but the queen movement is flaky. Even if it carefully drag and drop it, it just moves to a different block

I noticed that as well, sometimes you would select another box and it would land on another one dying !

This game is fun af man you were on to something

This is cool! I personally really dislike having AI on the leaderboard as it feels completely antithetical to human play.

Great game! Is it a different board each day?

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

That's fun. I may have missed it when starting: What are the rules of movement for the opponents?

They have the same movement as their equivalent chess pieces.

This is great! I would love this even more with a chess clock. 3+2 would be great!

Love it. The knights seem much more annoying / powerful than you'd expect.

Very fun game! I really like the idea. Already shared it with my chess group :D

This is really really awesome

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

why does this suggest opening my password app the minute it loads?

https://i.imgur.com/MmJYyKG.png

The site has a hidden webauthn trigger[1], an anti-pattern that automatically logs user in via passkey if it exists. A better approach, IMO, would be requiring user to click "log in".

[1]: `<input type="text" autocomplete="username webauthn" style="position:fixed;top:0;left:0;width:1px;height:1px;opacity:0;pointer-events:none" aria-hidden="true" />`

Just fixed this, let me know if you run into more issues.

I'm hooked. I didn't even know I needed this.

Who is the owner, the creator of this nice game ?

Fun game! There should be a check mate though, right?

Cool game.

Seeing as this is HN, please can you talk tech stack?

You should add a timer. Bullet chess is fun

there's a {glitch|feature} where the castle can kill you after another piece moves out of the way, it will...

Click on the queen. It will show the order the pieces move. If one piece blocks another from killing you, and the first piece moves earlier, then the second will be able to move after and kill you.

Replay not working properly on mobile..?

Fun, responsive and intuitive. Congrats.

This is addicting, good job

This is really cool, bookmarked it

Genuinely interesting, thank you.

Looks really cool, keep going!

This is awesome :) thanks OP

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

Amazing how any time there’s a leaderboard there’s somebody using it to market their thing. I won’t name the one I see currently to avoid rewarding the behavior further (though I now have a negative view of them), but folks seriously: can we just do something fun for once and not see everything as an opportunity to be leveraged?

This is pretty fun!!

That was a lot of fun

Very cool, thanks!

I love this so much

This is amazing!

Big chess fan here.

This is great!

this is sick. need a multiplayer.

please add a shareable score!

Really fun !

i played some minutes, cool

Wait until you see my curling rogue like. Spoilerz curling fucking sucks solo.

nice game...

well done!

This is so cool bro

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