Zodiac - Animal chess
Hey r/chessvariants
I made a react webapp chess variant game called Zodiac chess - www.zodiac-chess.com
I'm not a professional developer or designer by any means so any feedback on the UI is very welcome!
Its 13 unique pieces, some cross over with chess, some new movement patterns!
The idea is that in this game the king is selected secretly from each player, so it is more a bluff version of chess, but also with some RNG and extra hidden information baked in
It is also rostered per game - so the search space is ginormous - 595 billion + starting states per game, to stave off rote memorization in favor of fresh challenges / solutions - you are overwhelmingly likely to never see the same configuration twice in a lifetime
I also want to develop this game through large data - if we can get a player base, we want this game to celebrate novel play and won't know exploits until we see a large player base finding meta's that close down creative play
Another goal is to create a great balance between complexity and simplicity - with only 5 pieces on each side, it shouldn't feel overwhelming, the piece movements aren't especially complex although there is some niche interactions! We want the game to feel deep but intuitive at the same time
Please give any feedback or bugs in the top right menu - also I apologize in advance that its not fully optimized for mobile as it is for PC yet!
<3