Show HN: King Thirteen: 2048 with chess pieces, in under 13 KB

This is just incredibly fun, congratulations! It reminds me of "Really Bad Chess" which I also love: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.noodlecake...

Two things, one on-topic and the other off-topic:

The thing which makes 2048 moderately easy to reason about is that incoming pieces are always "1". However, this game appears to spawn in random pieces, with random point values. I tried to follow the to-and-fro of the design blog in order to find out why this is, and I get the impression it's for avoiding getting the player stuck, but it does have the disadvantage of making planning incredibly hard. The good news is that by reading the blog I finally understood what was going on with the screen shake

off-topic: that "Subscribe to me blog" modal is not only bad UX (imho, of course), but also doubles down on the UX tire-fire by resetting my reading position to the top of the page. It's almost enough to warrant a command-w right there. Just one datum, but it for sure made me sad

Please consider crediting Threes, not 2048 as the "ancestor". The designers of threes have a well-written blog post on how they feel 2048 ripped them off. It's a good discussion on iteration in game design, among other topics.

https://asherv.com/threes/threemails/

Very nice work, congrats!

The combo UI just doesn't work for me. I didn't understand what was happening until reading the blog post, the game just felt broken since it was inconsistent whether a piece maintained focus or not. And even after knowing about it, I was constantly making misplays due to clickin on a unit I wanted to move, and instead having the pre-selected unit capture the clicked unit.

It might be worth trying out a model where the combo piece is highlighted graphically, but you still need to first click on that unit first if you want to move it.

It would be nice to disable sound completely.

When the board is almost full, it's difficult to know which pieces can move. Perhaps add some green shade to the ones that can move.

Loved the little twist on the mechanics of 2048, instead of just mindlessly pushing down-left-down-left most of the time, you actually had to think about the proper moves of the pieces. Nice to add a second dimension onto the play, had my rusty wheels turning for a little bit before it bit me.

Really nice little game! I instantly got addicted to it, but managed to "beat" it already on the second of two very long tries, so maybe a tad bit too easy? Some observations:

- I noticed very late that the king will actually "kill" (or capture in chess terms) my pieces if "cornered". While this is a nice feature, even if it doesn't happen when the player is just one step away from losing, it still prolongs the game even more.

- I also noticed very late that I can win the game by capturing the king with a 1024 piece (in my case it was a queen). I only found out because I got into the habit of selecting all pieces in turn to check what moves were possible. I hope I'm not spoilering right now :)

- Would be nice if you could capture a screenshot of the final board without the "you win" overlay. I don't have a Twitter account and no, I'm not going to create one just for this game ;)

- Also would be nice if the score (maybe also the current highscore, like in 2048) would be shown somewhere during the game, not just at the end.

- One nice feature is that the game remembers the current state if you leave the browser tab open, so you can shut down your PC and return to it the next morning - badly needed also, because the games are really long...

Looks very nice, but definitely needs some explanation, not everyone is familiar with 2048. Not that the website even mentions 2048 :P

I didn't see any rules/explanation of how to play Is that intentional or maybe I'm missing it on mobile?

As a colorblind person I didn’t know there was multiple colours until very late

Really enjoyable. Only after my 1024 piece got captured did I see the undo button.

Managed a score of 6,000 ish. What a nifty twist on a couple of old games.

Scored 9876 and won it on first run but i did use the undo button! :) I stumbled the first half a bit but got the hang of it in the end and after finishing it I think i had more fun than original 2048. This is because this game requires you to carefully place the pieces each time while in original 2048, you could get to 1024 with just a lot of repeated movement (down+left for me) to group all biggest numbers to a corner

Great idea for a game and very playable. As others have said, it is much more interesting than 2048 due to the reduced repetition. It still seems beneficial to stack high value pieces out of the way (e.g. your biggest in the corner and then next biggest on an adjacent edge square). Towards the end it was getting quite frustrating having rooks appear in corners, but a good kind of frustrating!

Could the score be visible during the game to give a sense of the scoring rules? I didn't know the king eats pieces until I read the comments here... I would expect that to lose you points, but hard to tell unless the scoring is maybe documented somewhere I missed?

Super cool game! I sunk well over an hour into it, but I rage quit when the king stole my 1024 piece...I didn't realize that was an option. In retrospect, I guess that's what the shaky screen meant.

This was my game just before I stopped (the 1024 was next to the 256): https://ibb.co/gv0QR89

Really fun game, well done. People are complaining about the rules not being clear enough but IMO figuring out the rules as I went along was (unexpectedly) part of the fun. I had no idea how to win (or if the game even could be won) until I realised that my queen was now the same colour as the king, and then the penny dropped.

This is how sustainable software development should work. Not a 100 MB iPhone app or a 60 MB Android app.

Or 600 MB as in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41459629

You could code this on to an old 8 bit microcomputer ("micro" as in "not mainframe"!). I would have loved playing this in 1988!

Hey, fun Game. Took me a few rounds to find the right strategy (which is spoiler ... The 2048 strategy to aline powers of two on the border, which for me often lead to a sequence of Queens) and then it's unfortunately leading to the 2048-problem that one plays relatively simple strategy with annoyance by random generator ... it is a bit better as one needs "powerful" figures on the sequence (while not having a queen once can be fixed by the next queen ...) and can be interesting to force the king into a corner and locking it there. Were quite a few fun rounds, but I think I am "through" especially as it stops on the 2048, just like the original 2048 did.

Dang that king is bloodthirsty. I played for a while and it ate all the best blocks I ever made (a 512). Can my high score be the best I was doing before I lost it all?

This song is amazing, it's like midieaval FTL. The game's good too.

This is gonna destroy sooooooooooo many engineering school GPAs.

This game was way too good. I stuck with it until I beat it and loved everything - the music, the idea, and the moves felt so satisfying - especially the final one.

The first time I played I thought king would take my pieces with some probability if they weren't guarded. I spent way, way more effort than was necessary playing with higher stakes.

I thought I'd lose if the king was trapped—like some sort of stalemate—so I played through the game with that in mind. It might make for a fun variant.

I should add I didn't expect to find the rules in the Post-mortem, so I gave up on that after skimming through the page and jumped right into the game.

This game is so fun! I spent entirely too much time playing it just once last night, and got to the 1024 piece in the first run. I don't know how long it took me, but it was long. With 2048 my runs are far quicker.

I had so much fun finishing this. Much more interesting than other 2048 variants I've tried. I got a score of 9341.

Was not expecting Touhou music!

Fun game! Won on my first try and it felt a satisfying playthrough. Still don't fully understand the rules.

Eg. Are new pieces random? Since the king can eat clutter does that prevent you from losing?

This is fantastic

I hope you post again when you've made a standalone page and/or mobile versions, this game deserves lots of success :)

This is incredibly well-done and fun and just plain works!!!! Congratulations!

Without reading any instructions, I really liked this game... until my top piece got removed. :)

Incredibly fun, and makes sense now that I have read the design/instructions.

That's a really great game, congratulations!

Love the styling and the music, great job!!!

This is great. Good job.

I don't understand the rules for when a piece is allowed to capture another piece.

EDIT: Oh, a piece can merge with any piece that has the same numerical value. This makes the game far more playable.

This is awesome

this was a lot of fun, great job

mmm honestly at some point i was wondering if it was actually possible to lose. i tried actively and it took me sooo long. Felt like the numbers were actually coming specifically to help you have moves

  How to play:
  * Join forces
  * Claim the throne
  * Revel in glory