Show HN: Nichess – Chess with Health Points

3 points by wilbur_whateley 19 days ago | 8 comments

Hi, I've been making a game like chess where pieces have special abilities and health points. This allows for much finer balancing and many more variants compared to regular chess. For example, pieces can push or pull other pieces, deal area of effect (AOE) damage, have lots of health points and be difficult to destroy, use ranged attacks, etc.

There is no video explaining all the rules, but the current version is very similar to chess. These are the main things you need to know:

1) Standard attack - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhGNNlnM7K8

2) Special abilities - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbE_jL7RB0E

Here's the link - https://www.nichess.org/ (you can try it without making an account, just start a new game).

If anyone has any thoughts or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

vunderba 18 days ago |

Nice job. I’ve played around with something like this in the past (chess pieces with RPG stats).

You should definitely check out Archon. It was released on a bunch of systems, but I know it from the NES. It’s pretty interesting and tries to blend more tactical, real-time elements into a chess-like game. Highly recommended.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archon:_The_Light_and_the_Dark

wilbur_whateley 18 days ago | |

Games from that time had so much soul. I wish I were better at the art side of things.

gus_massa 18 days ago |

It would be nice to a table of the show the ability points on the side of the board for people like me that press "play" before reading the rules :)

wilbur_whateley 18 days ago | |

You're right, I'll add that. You remember them after playing for some time, but it is useful for a new player.

gus_massa 17 days ago | | |

I won my second game!

Knight and Pawns are strong. YOLOwing a Pawn forward looks like a good strategy. (YMMV) I'm scared to move my Knights.

In the default mode, I check the King with a Maenad but the AI didn't move it, so I won. I'm not sure what happened. From a previous project of Chess with very rules, one problem with the AI is that when it has a very bad losing position it does not even try, so when I'm lucky to get enough advantage the AI just lose everything with stupid moves.

In this case, I already have an advantage, probably a Mead, half a Pirate and a few Pawns, after successfully YOLOwing a Pawn. Perhaps you shoud add some training to the AI to avoid direct King capture.

InputName 18 days ago |

So is there any reason for why some pieces have ten health points when the minimum ability point is thirty?

wilbur_whateley 18 days ago | |

Yes! Special abilities (Queen-Maenad and Pirate-Pirate) deal 20 damage to neighboring pieces. The only difference between 10 HP pieces and 30 HP pieces is that 30 HP pieces can survive that.

wilbur_whateley 19 days ago |

AI playing Nichess 1 against itself - https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLN0TnHkszmgQSnFrvF_ANIzX8...