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.

https://echochess.com/

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.

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).

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.

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.

The two major things I would change:

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.

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

I thought you were not supposed to be on "death" reach from the non playable pieces but apparently this doesn't matter.

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.

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? :)

Why do you need my phone number?

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.

Cool idea.

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?

Related:

Echo Chess: The Quest for Solvability - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37327895 - Aug 2023 (106 comments)

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.

Nice!

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?

Love it, solved in 6 moves... looking forward to the iOS app...

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

Great little game @ramly! Quick question about Zen Mode, are you using something like Wave Function Collapse to create the infinite game?

Finally, Chess 2.

Such groovy music and a cool mechanic!

ECHO CHESS Mar 25 (C)

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0:27 sec 1/8 tries 14 moves

What a great idea, quite addictive.

The hearts at the bottom confused me. As did the score at the end.

Very clever. Congrats!

off topic:

is the background music inspired by "We are the robots"?

what feels strange is that almost none of chess rules apply...