Hey again HN! I'm sami, the creator of echo chess. Humbled to see this game up on HN again. This is a chess variant I first developed as a beta last year and the feedback from the community has been incredibly helpful.
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 like the music, but consider starting it muted and only downloading 3.6MB of mp3 if someone unmutes.
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 Waterluvian, that's actually a really good point. Do you feel the same about the rest of the sound effects, or is it mostly the music starting as ON in the context of a web game that feels unexpected?
Music is 9/10ths of it. If it played sounds that’s generally fine as long as they can be muted. But I personally feel strongly that music should start muted if it’s a webpage.
Thanks for taking the time to respond to feedback!
That's very nice to hear, thank you vlw. I think there is a good argument on both sides. This is one of those areas where I will definitely be making improvements down the line with a proper settings menu for sounds, visuals, etc. Really appreciate the feedback!
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.
Thanks edanm, really glad you're enjoying echo chess! Very good point, will iterate on that. Would it help if the obstacle squares had some pattern/texture in them or something like an 'x' inside instead of simply being a different color?
Yeah I tried experimenting with that a bit at the beginning. For some reason it kept looking too '3D-ish' compared to the rest of the flat material design. Do you have any visual examples you've seen of something closer to what you have in mind? Would be super helpful, thanks.
...Also for anyone who's curious about the extremely deep rabbit hole involved in this project, I think you'll enjoy this (somewhat) quick read: https://samiramly.com/chess
Whoa, this post is actually really inspiring! It gives me a better understanding for why Echo Chess has more replayability than other lil' games I've toyed with. It makes me want to poke at new ideas now. Thanks for sharing this crazy journey of yours!
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?
Thanks so much for reading this beast of a tech article haha! I'm glad you enjoyed it. I'm surprised people are actually reading the whole thing lol. Thank you for the kind words.
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.
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!
(btw for replay button do you mean specifically a button that allows you to Undo a certain move, or did you mean the ability to rewatch a whole game's sequence of moves after it's done?)
Yeah - if you cvan rewatch - then you can devise a better strategy -- or at least list the moves on the side?
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!
So is the idea that the dark red squares are inaccessible and you just can't move to them? I spent way too long trying to figure that out. I was stuck thinking along the lines of not being able to to move into check, even after transformation to another piece.
Yup, you can't move to them. Weirdly I didn't notice them at all until several attempts in (and was getting confused as to why certain moves weren't allowed), in a way that reminded me of the Selective Attention Test[0]. Once I'd clocked them I was able to solve it pretty quickly.
That Selective Attention experiment always amazes me. It's like one of those things that shouldn't really work but they somehow do. Like welding an impossible triangle.
Workaround: pick the piece and move the finger upwards, then you can freely move it around (as in, instead of press-down-release, do press-up-down-release).
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...
The drag down gesture in Firefox was disabled last year because it interfered with page content. Are you running an old version or did you explicitly re-enable that behavior somehow?
Nah, try the universal "don't go here" indicator of close diagonal lines like you see in parking lots. Keep the shading of the lines and the square background relatively similar so they convey the message without distracting from the rest of the board.
Yeah I think that might actually be a good idea to try out. I tested a few things with shapes during the beta but they kept looking too '3D'ish for the rest of the theme. Not sure if I'm explaining it right but the obstacle shapes kept popping out of the background somehow. Do you know what I mean?
I like the game, and the website, but this daily format combined with how fast the game is to play doesn't get me engaged enough to save it to my favbar and return - I just didn't have enough time to get hooked and really dislike artificial scarcity like this. Wordle worked imo because it's so immersive and it's not as rapid to conclude - also because there is a very limited set of 5 words in english comparing to chess scenarios or other games that are following the same trend recently (without a proper reasoning).
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.
Hey TheRealPomax, just reading this. Super fair point about the phone number. It was only meant to be there for keeping the login convenient for mobile users through Twilio verify. Totally see your point though and I can see how this could be interpreted instead. Will be changing this to email/username instead. Really appreciate the feedback, it's incredibly helpful. Thank you.
Hey gverrilla, looks like you tried the game when the traffic was at the peak and the server crashed temporarily. If you'd like to give it another try, we're fully live again online.
The idea isn’t bad, but I’m struggling to understand why a login is required to access an archive of free content, and why said login requires a phone number. Again, to access ostensibly free content.
That makes me really suspicious about what you do with the phone number.
Thanks guys, super helpful feedback! Sorry about that, the Twilio phone login was meant to make it more convenient for the mobile users to keep going with a direct code. I can totally see how that's perceived though, you're 100% correct. Will be changing the auth to username or email instead.
Very helpful feedback, will get this right. Thanks again for the feedback guys.
Even if they do absolutely nothing with the number, I'm not putting it in. It's not a question of their intention but my convenience and peace of mind.
100% fair. Sorry about that quantxx. The mobile login was only meant to facilitate the login for mobile users through quick Twilio verification. Will move that to username or email instead. Really appreciate the feedback.
reddit has the worst dark pattern in this case... I think most people think they need an email address to signup... yet you can just click next and skip email input... I have about 40 reddit accounts with no emails associated with them... first one was probably created 15 years ago, and last one yesterday
I like it, but I find it frustrating that zen mode is timed and that I have to login to access past puzzles - I don't find it enjoyable or worth it with these constrains.
Thanks for the helpful input on this. Concerning the zen mode constraint, do you feel like the countdown timer is what's feeling off-putting to you, or is it the combo reset on shuffling?
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.
Great points, thanks for sharing the feedback. Noted for #1. For #2, did you mean separately from the results screen you get at the end of a daily puzzle? That screen shows a move efficiency bar at the bottom with something like
"Only 12 moves! Best is 10"
Granted this will be displayed in a much better way over time.
I am probably wrong about #2. It's probably too easy if you get the # optimal moves. If you know the number of moves, that tells you how many non capture moves. That is a very strong hint, especially since there are only a handful of real choices per puzzle (at least today).
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.
This is a lot of fun and surprisingly tricky to calculate. One point of feedback: it would be cool if after solving it told you what the lowest possible number of moves was for that puzzle. It seems to just tell me the lowest number I've done?0
Thanks! Glad you're enjoying the echo chess variant. It does show you at the end - there's like a progress bar with how many moves you got and what the best known number of moves is. Is it not displaying correctly on your end?
FYI if anyone temporarily experienced a missing puzzle yesterday, I'm sorry this is the first experience that you were welcomed in. The HN hug is real.
Had to run around switching servers asap but thankfully the rest of the puzzles and Zen Mode stayed intact and playable.
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? :)
Hey guys, super fair feedback, sorry for missing the mark on this as I was trying to keep the login flow convenient for mobile users through Twilio Verify code. See more here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39831178
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!
Help! Hey guys, thanks for all the love. So many people playing the game right now, the site is starting to crash and is showing default puzzles instead of today's dailies :') anyone here can help?
I have seen it mentioned before. It does not work on my computer, but I wrote an implementation that does (in Free Hero Mesh, which is a programming language that I invented for making up puzzle games). However, I do not have the puzzles. Do you have a copy of the puzzles?
Really cool! It would be nice if there was an icon on the inaccessible squares to indicate it. I also didn’t feel the lives counter at the bottom was necessary. And like others have mentioned, click->square is better in some cases for accessibility reasons.
Thank you janalsncm, very helpful feedback! Will take note of all these. Concerning the lives not feeling necessary, do you mind sharing how many attempts it took you to solve the puzzle?
Ah sorry I misunderstood! The concept of lives actually arose from a lot of playtesting and valuable feedback during the beta. Many players were feeling that there is no real 'cost' to brute-forcing the exploration of every possible path on the board.
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.
Sure thing. Keep in mind by the way that it's actually already prohibitively difficult for a player to truly brute-force their way around the board, especially in larger boards. Below is a rough intuition-based proof of why that is.
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?
Site back up online! Thank you everyone for bearing with me on this and sorry for keeping you waiting with the wrong daily puzzle config. You guys literally broke the game. GG HN. GG.
There is something unique about this game. Very minimalistic at the same time I think the game would not be as fun if the puzzles were not designed the way they are. Thanks, very interesting.
I feel you haha. Don't worry though, in Echo Chess a king is pretty much equivalent to a queen given that it's always your turn. Obviously move counts are different and the struggle in Zen Mode is real.
Great point actually. Will add that, thanks figers! echo chess is already a progressive web app fyi, you can install it directly from the website if you want. but yes, a native iOS app would be great as well.
Unless I missed, maybe some description of the goal, in the beggining it wasn't quite clear to me that the goal was to capture the whole pieces, and only a subset of chess rules are available.
I'm not sure I'm getting the right one - this has a bishop, a knight, a king and a pawn - but this is my result:
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.
That's a pretty interesting perspective given that all pieces in EC follow standard chess movements and capturing mechanisms. It's certainly a variant, which makes it more interesting imho. In the puzzle world you could refer to such a game as a chess-like.
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.
https://echochess.com/