Echo Chess: chess variant where you are what you eat

Also make sure to turn on the sound, music is retro and has cool vibes 😎

Hi there!! Super fun game, really unique concept. Would love to know a few things:

1. How is difficulty determined? Like what makes something "epic" vs "classic", and could you give some insight on how those boards are generated?

2. Along the same lines, have you created/curated any levels yourself or are they all algo-generated?

the zen mode is super fun. got today's classic pretty quickly but still working on the epic. this is great stuff...what time does the new one come out, is it midnight/what timezone?

ECHO CHESS
Mar 18 (C)

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2/8 tries
9 moves

Wow! This kind of gameplay is really fun! What an interesting game mechanic! I’ve been playing it for hours now, I’m not that good with chess in general but this sure makes me want to try to win with the least moves possible! Great game!

I'm glad to see Echo Chess here! It's a very clever variant and lots of fun. I started playing it late last year and it helped to re-ignite my interest in Chess. I definitely recommend giving it a try!

what a great game! ✨

So glad to hear @PharmersOnly! I've heard someone in the community compare ZEN mode to a roguelite game of sorts. Not sure if the definition fully applies here, but I think there's definitely something about the combos going up and up, then crashing fully the first time you mess up, like a permadeath.
I think they're right that it makes that game mode addicting in a paradoxically zen/hardcore way lmao

Cool game and I had a lot of fun playing seems addicting at the same time!

Omg I love this game it’s addicting

@Jamzpaul thanks for the feedback, super helpful! I think the tap-tap move is an excellent point actually. Will see if I can slot that in the next release and noted on the timer for Zen, great point too. Glad you're enjoying echo chess

@chachachessi Nice! Let me know if you need any help or hints for the Epic puzzle. The daily puzzles automatically reset at midnight every night in your local timezone

Luckily i have found this game! It might actually replace my daily chess puzzle routine!

@clarkeg02 Excellent questions 👌
First for #2: the answer is yes, I've crafted each DAILY CLASSIC and DAILY EPIC puzzle myself, ran them through a ton of playtesting with the early access community, and curated them using first principles and iteration. Every ZEN MODE puzzle, however, is real-time generated from a random parametrized distribution. More on that below.
Now for #1: this is a really deep, deep rabbit hole. There's a short version and a long version of this answer. I'll give a high-level teaser here as to the intuition, but definitely happy to share more if there's interest.
From a first-principle perspective, there are a lot of aspects of a puzzle in a given game that can be quantified and compared for a better sense of intuitive difficulty. Things like "how many moves it takes a player of a certain ELO to solve it", "how many attempts", "how long does it typically take them", "is there a correlation between this puzzle and 'similar' puzzles where such a player would also perform in a similar way", and so on. In some sense in theory you could run a certain regression analysis on a lot of puzzles played by a player base and derive a certain difficulty score from it.
What Echo Chess does is actually somewhat different - and arguably better, given that it's a byproduct of the procedural gen ML model itself. The ZEN Mode generator/solver process is trained on early beta crowdsourced Echo Chess puzzle solvability data (all actually anonymous, not anonymized), and actually makes use of a solvability classifier that comes up with a solvability prediction score for any candidate puzzle.
That score ends up being a nice copilot gauge in the manual design process because it gives some good guidance as small changes are made to the same board setup like "one more obstacle here", "move the bishop one square to the left", and so on.
TL;DR: manual design + copilot from the solvability classifier. Hope this helps

did anyone figure out how to solve today's puzzle (the epic one) in 21 moves. i solved it in 27, no clue how to get down to 21

Mar 18 (E)

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7/8 tries
27 moves

Interesting gameee!!! Will surely check it out!!!

Wow this game mechanic is unique and interesting😍😍😍👌

This is really cool and creative, hats off to you @cyborgafterall!

I just spent some time on the 3/18 Epic puzzle, and the moment I solved it I was already looking forward to the next one. This without a doubt will join my rotation of daily puzzles going forward.

The "you are what you eat" mechanism is so innovative and challenging - it really flips a lot of my chess intuition on its head. I suspect that in the long run, playing this game regularly will make me a better chess player.

@chachachessi you're super close! if you're getting 27 on the EPIC (and judging from the path of your first 4 attempts with the rooks only partially captured) then I'm guessing you're already finding the right end path + start path, it's just that your middle path is not the most efficient. At the risk of a spoiling hint, have you tried taking South then North, instead of North-South?

I appreciate how the game triggers some of the same thought patterns that we get from solving standard tactical chess puzzles (tracing chains of consequences, calculating the appropriate approach, etc.), but then subverts them utterly. Instead of coming up with repartees to your adversary's best defenses, you feel as if you're an alien blob assimilating each piece, working together towards the goal. The pieces to be eaten are not the soldiers of an opponent; they are merely pieces of you that don't know it yet.

The app seems to great!

Looking forward to everyday challenge. Hoping for a community of chess-variant problem solvers present!