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Show HN: Matle – A Daily Chess Puzzle Inspired by Wordle

85 pointsby m88m3 months ago
Matle[1], a daily puzzle game that combines chess and Wordle mechanics. You have to guess a hidden checkmate.<p>How it works: 1. You’re given a board with five hidden squares. 2. Guess the pieces in those squares. 3. You must form a checkmate!<p>Hints work like Wordle: Correct piece &amp; position Correct piece, wrong position ⬜ Wrong piece<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.matle.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.matle.io&#x2F;</a>

30 comments

stavros3 months ago
It&#x27;s really confusing to me that I drag a piece, I drop it on a square, it stays there, and there&#x27;s an animation that the piece returns to the bottom. If it stays there, it shouldn&#x27;t have a &quot;returning&quot; animation. Otherwise, it&#x27;s an interesting puzzle.
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inanutshellus3 months ago
I guess I was a bit flippant about my guesses and realized I made two guesses that were invalid because they weren&#x27;t actually checkmates.<p>IMO those should count as guesses.<p>I felt like an imposter getting the praise &quot;Wow, you&#x27;re fast!&quot; and &quot;only two guesses!&quot; when I&#x27;d actually submitted 4 guesses... just that two were so bad that the game rejected them outright. lol.
dmonitor3 months ago
Very cool idea, and very well implemented. My only feedback is that you should clarify whether the solution has to be a valid position that can be reached in a chess game.
ldb3 months ago
Very nice idea. Reminds me a bit of <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chessguessr.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.chessguessr.com&#x2F;</a>.
axus3 months ago
Worked pretty well. It was nice that it told me &quot;this is not a mate&quot;, I&#x27;d have burned through all my tries without that guardrail.
oyster1433 months ago
Seems cool, reminds me of this video where top GMs guess the position without seeing the pieces. Some can even name players and the date of the game.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;_Ntn4jEv7rE?feature=shared" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;_Ntn4jEv7rE?feature=shared</a>
bigstrat20033 months ago
I think this is cool, but you should eliminate the possibility for squares to be empty. This is already significantly harder than Wordle because almost nobody is going to know the positions of games by heart (so you <i>have</i> to randomly guess in many cases). The possibility of blank spaces is just cruel to add on top of that inherent difficulty.
ajkjk3 months ago
at least on the first one there was really only one way it could have happened under reasonable assumptions (mainly, that the white queen had just been taken). I&#x27;m not sure it works very well for the Wordle format, although it is fun as a puzzle otherwise.
Out_of_Characte3 months ago
Managed to guess it on the first try after realising it looked like a real game. Bit sad to see only one puzzle per day.<p>Sharing the result also reveils the solution in copied text, maybe remove that so someone could share the exact puzzle without immediatly seeing the solution.
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maaaaattttt3 months ago
At first I thought it would be the typical chess exercise question, just that everybody gets the same one each day, but I like the approach you have. Makes one think differently than usual.
miningape3 months ago
This is actually an interesting take on a chess puzzle, instead of calculate the winning sequence it&#x27;s asking you to reconstruct it.<p>Very cool to have to think in the other direction to solve it.
egglemonsoup3 months ago
Looks really cool, although way beyond my chess ability. Nice work
littlestymaar3 months ago
The experiment is cool, but after this first attempt I wonder if it&#x27;s not going to be too easy to guess in just one try lots of times.
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prettyblocks3 months ago
I really liked it. I found it to be quite difficult, but somehow managed to solve the problem in 4 tries. At first I didn&#x27;t quite realize that you can put opposing pieces on the board so I think I wasted one or two turns. In general, love the concept and execution, but seems like it might have a pretty narrow audience of chess enthusiasts.
dudefeliciano3 months ago
Cool! not getting any response from the share result button on firefox (got it on the second try and wanted to brag a bit about it)
emily08243 months ago
Good idea, maybe you can make a game decryption tool like this, like <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wordletoday.cc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wordletoday.cc&#x2F;</a>, you can try <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wordletoday.cc&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;wordletoday.cc&#x2F;</a>
robertlagrant3 months ago
Some hints:<p>- not every square with a ? needs to be filled<p>- a piece that&#x27;s marked as yellow or green may appear more than once (if that&#x27;s legal)<p>- you can see your previous guesses by clicking on the guess history squares<p>- the game shows you pieces that have been eliminated based on their background colour in the pieces list under the board
h-c-c3 months ago
Fun puzzle! Fyi, does not play well with Brave - experimantal dark mode.<p>But I think that&#x27;s probably true of a lot of chess sites. I sort of feel like sites should have a way of flagging themselves as already in dark mode, so that they can be ignored by any dark mode extensions.
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Elixir64193 months ago
Todays matle.io had a few positions that were inconsequential to the mate itself and could be a lot of pieces other than the solution that could be reached through normal game so it&#x27;s pretty much a guessing game.
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lReficul3 months ago
There should be colorblind options. Makes the puzzle quite challenging.
raymond_goo3 months ago
Nice idea!<p>Here is mine: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.solitairle.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.solitairle.com&#x2F;</a>
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shirol3 months ago
That&#x27;s quite challenging for a first puzzle, though it is a well-known mate. Guessed in 3 tries
jmpavlec3 months ago
Loved it! I&#x27;m so so at chess but was able to get it in 3 tries. Nice execution with the UI.
h-c-c3 months ago
Also, it wasn&#x27;t immediately obvious that you only get the feedback after a valid checkmate.
Vincenius3 months ago
A fun idea and great execution. Looking forward to tomorrow&#x27;s puzzle
charlieyu13 months ago
I like this! Very creative tool to learn chess mating patterns
letsplaychess3 months ago
Today&#x27;s puzzle was very cool!
monroewalker3 months ago
Nice! Will be trying this over the next few days
voisin3 months ago
Incredible. Loved it!
pranshuchittora3 months ago
Sorry to say, but this is very unintuitive and hard.