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Show HN: Chess Twist

by frading on 5/31/24, 8:41 PM with 36 comments

I continue my experiment of transposing classic games onto an irregular grid. I've previously released variants of minesweeper and checkers. And now I'd like to share my variant of Chess.

Chess can be a pretty punishing game, but I thought this was nevertheless a way to make it even more challenging by making it trickier to anticipate your opponent, even though both players still have the same information.

From the playtests I've done, that challenge is pretty compelling.

It also seems to be more fun at 2 people, where both players keep surprising one another.

  • by SamBam on 6/2/24, 1:06 AM

    This is very cool, I'm enjoying it.

    One small note: I tried to castle, and was told "Castling is not allowed because your king was previously in check."

    This isn't one of the rules of castling in regular chess. [1]

    Also, it would be nice to implement the three-same-position draw, since I got trapped in a cycle of just moving my king back and forth forever.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Castling#Requirem...

  • by gus_massa on 6/1/24, 1:43 PM

    So in this version the bishops can change the color they can move on?

    The corners with 3 and 5 neighbour have a special mark. What does that mean?

    Can you share how the board is generated or it's part of the secret special sacuce? I think a blog post about the generation of the borard with a few nice graphics can get a lot of traction here.

  • by paipa on 6/1/24, 8:30 PM

    Very cool! Looking forward to playing it.

    I suggest to minimize visual clutter, because any new player's brain will be overloaded trying to figure out a board, and less is sometimes more.

    I'd remove the forward direction triangles where they can be unambiguously inferred from the baseline. A lower grain contrast wood texture might be a good idea too.

    You mentioned you sometimes use five tile colours but you can probably improve it: yes, the four colour theorem guarantees that :)

  • by tromp on 6/1/24, 8:13 PM

    Making Go Twist is a bit more straightforward, since the rules work unchanged for any undirected graph. Such as this diamond lattice [1] in which inner points still have 4 neighbours.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_variants#/media/File:Virgil...

  • by jncfhnb on 6/1/24, 8:47 PM

    Pawns should probably have a piece that indicates their orientation. As far as I can tell it is impossible to discern which way a pawn moves without querying the ui.