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.
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...
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.
So, Battle Chess 2026?
You’ve got me; I was very much a Battle Chess addict once upon a time…
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....)
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
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.
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!
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].
In this game, I think _some_ of the less general terms (stricter definition) also apply: turn-based movement, grid-based movement.
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).
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.
"Rogue-like" is the most over-used term these days. It now has almost no meaning, compared to what it used to mean.
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!
Fun, responsive and intuitive. Congrats.
That was a lot of fun
Genuinely interesting, thank you.
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.
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!
Big chess fan here.
This is great!
This is really really awesome
This is amazing!
great game well done i could easily play this for far too long
This is really cool, bookmarked it
This is really fun and intuitive. Pretty, too. What did you build it in?
i played some minutes, cool
Really fun !
This is so cool bro