Echo Chess: The Quest for Solvability (2023)

Summary

This story has stirred some great conversations on Hacker News. Many have reached out with great ideas for a v2. If you still want to chime in, just drop me a note.PrologueLet’s make Chess more fun in Single-Player. How hard could it be? ☠️This is the story of venturing too deep, head-first, into the unknown. It all started with a doodle on a piece of paper. This doodle to be exact.Some pics are only worth log(1k) words.I first conceived of this game on a whim as part of many strategy and puzzle games I’d been designing for fun. I was musing with the idea of a chess-inspired Turn-Based Strategy (TBS) game that no one would recognize as chess-based. My first attempts purposefully kept steering the theme away from chess. Why go vanilla when there are so many wilder thematic flavors and bolder mechanics to explore?Asymmetric rewards, alternating movement rules, stochastic obstacles, stealth, morphing, etc. A wise friend and fellow strategy game nerd* then said to me:The game’s dope. But what’s wrong with people associating it with Chess? No need to innovate that kernel away - their mental load would be taken up by re-learning how to move. Chess pieces are a universal language. They help them overcome the activation energy and figure out what’s going on.So I re-designed the rules, mechanics, and first few levels with a sharpie and a whiteboard Figma and a LLaMA sandwich paper and a pencil. Then I started testing it with friends by setting up this old wooden board I found in storage. Soon “the game” looked more like this.Fallen pieces = obstacles. Inverted ones = me running out of pieces (4 black rooks above).Ballpens are for board resizing. No, there’s no “game engine”. Yes, I personally update the game state for you every time you move. No, Hollywood hasn’t texted me yet.Something surprising started happening quickly. Anyone who tried the game got hooked. People would keep coming back trying to beat levels they couldn’t solve. They’d ask me to manually reset the board ...