Show HN: Schmess – chess with no turns; pieces freeze on cooldown after moving

Show HN: Schmess – chess with no turns; pieces freeze on cooldown after moving(schmess.com)

2 points by navalsaini 42 days ago | 6 comments

Solo dev here. Schmess is chess with the turn structure removed. Both players move whenever they have a free slot, and every piece freezes on a cooldown after it moves. It's on a half board, with 100+ puzzle stages. If two people played this over a physical board they'd scrape each other's fingers raw - that's roughly the tempo.

Plays in the browser, no signup. 29 stages free, one-time unlock for the rest ($3.99 / Rs 149). No subscription, no ads.

It's the second of a few small-board variants I'm building (halfchess was the first, more coming). Building a chess engine for a game with no turns turned out to be the hard part - I've put the war stories in a comment below.

vunderba 42 days ago |

Nice job. There was actually an attempt to build a physical, real-time chess prototype back in 2015 that you might also find interesting, called Dengekisen: Speed Chess.

In that version, each piece had its own small cooldown timer that had to expire before you were allowed to move it again.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QikOIRs3MTo

navalsaini 41 days ago | |

I love the chessboard design on the table top. I will love to do in schmess chessboards.

evanjrowley 42 days ago |

I wonder if adding a "dark souls" mode, where each move is delayed by a wind-up (or perhaps slow movement?), might result in more strategic gameplay approaches.

navalsaini 42 days ago | |

Agreed-adding a wind-up delay would make gameplay significantly more strategic.

From an engine and state-space perspective, a "Dark Souls mode" creates a massive challenge.

Explosive Search Tree: Because moves overlap in time, evaluating positions via traditional brute-force depth/breadth search becomes nearly impossible. The state space expands exponentially (or infinitely, without cooldowns).

Strategy over Calculation: Because an AI or player can't brute-force every micro-timeline, win conditions rely far more on high-level positional control and timing anticipation rather than raw calculation.

Endgame Dynamics: Cooldown management would dominate the endgame. It could either make drawing much easier or completely alter fundamental checkmate patterns (like King + Rook vs. King).

Great concept to think through!

navalsaini 42 days ago |

Correction - plays in the app (no signup)

navalsaini 41 days ago | |

Can play it on browser now - https://schmess.com/demo