Alternatives
Products that do what Knight Rise does
On-device chess: Rust engine, board scanner, zero tracking
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Hi HN! I'm the developer of rdx, a mildly popular ad-free, privacy and user friendly Reddit client. This time, I made something for a very specific use case: solving chess puzzles with no internet. Why? Well, my Wi-Fi is terrible in the bathroom—and that's where I do some of my best thinking. I tried printing out “mate in X” puzzles to solve offline, but they weren’t fun without interaction. So I built OffChess. OffChess is an iPhone/Android app that contains over 100,000 chess puzzles, fully offline and completely ad-free. You can solve puzzles by category (Mate in…
2025 · offchess.com
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We built ChessBoss at the TechCrunch Disrupt hackathon this week. It didn’t make the top 10 but I thought Hacker News might think it’s pretty cool. https://devpost.com/software/chess-boss There are these really cool smart chessboards that can suggest moves and track your games... but they’re $400 and weigh 19 pounds. And of course there are apps that can analyze games but tracking and inputting games by hand is a huge pain. Or fully-digital chess apps... but board games are way more fun in real life! We wondered: “why can’t you just do that in software and bring the best…
2019 · devpost.com
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I made a chess engine today, and made it fit within 2KB. I used a variant of MinMax called Negamax, with alpha beta pruning. For the board representation I have used a 120-cell "mailbox". I managed to squeeze in checkmate/stalemate in there, after trimming out some edge cases. I am a great fan of demoscene (computer art subculture) since middle school, and hence it was a ritual i had to perform. For estimating the Elo, I measured 240 automated games against Stockfish Elo levels (1320 to 1600) under fixed depth-5 and some constrained rules, using equal color distribution. Then converted…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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I built over the last two years a human-like neural network chess engine that tries to predict your rating from a single game. It automatically adapts to your play and tries to play like a human at your level would play, giving you a balanced game. At the core I’m using an AlphaZero / Leela Chess Zero style neural network that I have trained on 1 billion human games from the lichess.org open database. Around this network I have built a chess engine in Rust with algorithms that use the outputs from the NN to produce human-like moves at a given rating from beginner to world champion, as…
2022 · noctie.ai
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Thought I would post in celebration of 1 year of my website being online. I've been working on it on and off and currently the website allows users to play Hex, Tumbleweed, Amazons, and Connect 6 against friends or against practice bots. I've been a long time player of some of these games and I felt for a long time that the world could use a few more popular abstract strategy games compared to Chess or Go. If you try it, let me know what you think. I'm always looking for new games or new features to add :)
Oct 2025 · abstractboardgames.com
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I made a game (https://polyfight.io/) which revolves around a player (a tank) leveling up and upgrading by killing shapes and other tanks (partially inspired by https://diep.io). It has a bunch of features, a vast number of tanks, an inbuilt chatting system, clans to make teams with your friends, a colour scheme maker, controllable sandboxes which can be public or private, a last man standing gamemode, and an inbuilt 1v1 system with its own ELO rankings and a global leaderboard. The game has a few players right now, and I'd hope to spread the joy players have with…
2024 · polyfight.io
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2019 · mnml.gg
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Hi HN! I built a simple chess game so that my son in Singapore can play chess with his grandfather in China. Why? There is currently no service or open source software that has all of the following: * All processing and assets on a single server (Critical to workaround a firewall) * No email account required (Chinese Internet services typically login via WeChat) * Works on Android browser * Simple to install and config I built it, together with Claude Code, using simple and boring technologies (Django + Client-side JS). I hope that when you use it, you will find it simple to understand…
Sep 2025 · github.com
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When I was in high school, my dad showed me how to play Knight Tour on a piece of paper. Many years passed before I decided to create the Knight's Graph app. “Knight's Graph” is an intellectual puzzle game based on the classic knight tour problem, known since the 18th century. Your task is to move the chess knight across the board so that each square is visited exactly once. Test your logical and strategic skills in an exciting game where every game is a new challenge! The app is already available for download on the App Store. Google Play will be available a little later. App Store:…
2024 · apps.apple.com
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I've been having fun building out a really simple chess learning app for my daughter (7). It started with just "maze like" puzzles [1] and I've added a few more. This "radioactive pooping knights" idea came from an Irish primary school chess website [2]. Really simple idea, two knights moving around the board leaving poo behind... Don't be the one forced to step on it. * best played with sound on. [1]. https://minichessgames.com/#/movement/knight [2]. https://ficheall.ie/ *highly subjective, may not be better for you to play with sound at all ;) p.s.…
Dec 2025 · minichessgames.com
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Play chess online or offline, analyze games with an engine.
Jun 2026 · play.google.com
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