How to Play

Pick a difficulty and a colour, then tap one of your pieces — every square it can legally reach lights up, with a red ring on anything you can capture. Tap a highlighted square to move there. Castling is offered automatically when it's legal: tap your king and the square two files across. Push a pawn to the far rank and you choose what it becomes, including a knight if that's the move. The status line tells you whose turn it is and warns you when you're in check; Undo takes back your move and the computer's reply together, so you always land back on your own turn.

Tips

• The computer looks several moves ahead and never misses a hanging piece, so before you commit, check what the square you're moving to is actually defended by — a free-looking capture is usually the bait for a recapture you'll like a lot less.
• Castle early on Medium and Hard. The opponent's evaluation rewards a king tucked behind its own pawns and punishes one stuck in the centre, which means it will go after an uncastled king directly rather than developing quietly.
• Knights are worth more than bishops when the position is closed and pawns block the long diagonals, and less when the board opens up. The engine values them almost equally, so trading a bishop for a knight in a locked position is one of the places you can genuinely out-play it.
• On Easy the computer only looks two moves deep, so it will take material that costs it a piece on the third move — set up two-move tactics like forks and pins rather than hoping for a one-move blunder.
• Promotion isn't always a queen. If promoting to a queen would leave the opponent stalemated with no legal move, the game is drawn and your whole endgame is wasted — take a rook instead, or a knight when it comes with check.

Behind this game

I wrote this engine from scratch and had no idea if the rules were right. One counting test settled it before I shipped.

Read how I fixed it — a devlog by Neeraj Kotwani, who builds every game here.

Comments

Loading comments…