Alternatives
Products that do what Zilch · Level up your skills coding Ping Pong bots, Chess bots and more does
Zilch is an online platform created to help folks level up their coding skills with a suite of well-known games (like Table Tennis, Tic-Tac-Toe and Chess) that are built to be played by bots - bots you design and program. Here's a 3 minute overview video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAsWdtWx9aE The "manifesto" sums up the rational behind the method: https://www.zilch.dev/manifesto Zilch is in its early stages. It has a lot of room to grow! Your feedback will have a big impact on its future direction. Thanks! Braden
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2019 · bot.land
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Hi HN! I made many small web games in the past with Unity or Phaser. But this time I wanted to make something completely on my own. So I coded a basic game framework in plain JavaScript, and used it to make Almost Pong. This was a really fun project that taught me a lot about JavaScript, and I plan to make more minimalist games with this framework. Interesting fact: Almost Pong doesn't load any assets, all sprites and sounds are generated with code. Happy to answer questions, and please let me know if you have any feedback on the game. Thanks!
2022 · lessmilk.com
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2023 · lost-at-sql.therobinlord.com
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2021 · chrisbutner.github.io
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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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Hey, maker here. After launching a daily word search game, I randomly thought of this math game while driving. Finally got around to making it and I think it turned out pretty cool. It’s a math search game that’s meant to help you practice your quick addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division skills. I’m hoping it’ll help people (even those like me who aren’t big on math) learn and increase their speeds. (There are also some settings you can enable to make the game harder) If you try it out, please let me know if you found it fun, if you have anything you’d like me to add, or if you…
2024 · worchle.com
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blunderchess.net is an open source, peer-to-peer chess app where every five moves, players each get to make one blunder-move for their opponent
2025 · blunderchess.net
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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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Hello, In 2010 I made an open-ended programming game based on Befunge and Brainf*k. I was young and didn't know what I was doing - coding it in AutoIT of all things and using borderless windows for sprites. Nevertheless, it was a full game and some people actually played it, sharing solutions with each other. I took it as a sign that the game had some potential - I appreciated this very much at the time. It was zachlike at its core, except that it came out earlier than SpaceChem and the term hadn't been coined yet. Years passed, I worked in the game industry, had some fun, learned a few…
2025 · store.steampowered.com
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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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I built 1e4.ai - a chess web app where you play against neural networks trained to mimic human Lichess players at specific Elo ranges. There's a separate model for each 100-point rating bucket from ~800 to 2200+, and the bots not only choose human-like moves but also burn clock time, play worse under time pressure, and blunder in human-like ways. Live demo: https://1e4.ai Code: https://github.com/thomasj02/1e4_ai A few things that might be interesting: - Trained on almost a full year of Lichess blitz games, around 1B total games - Architecture is an a small…
May 2026
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2025 · screensaverchess.com
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Hello! I created SpicyChess(https://spicychess.com) because I wanted a tactics training app that would have the following features: - Spaced Repetition. - Countdown time to simulate blitz Chess where you have to find the best move quickly. - The ability to save puzzles for later review. I'd love to hear any feedback that you may have !
2023 · spicychess.com
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Hey there! I just finished a youtube video explaining our donut chess in detail: https://youtu.be/iRcfHCPFgkM So I thought it'd be cool to show it off here too- it can be played around with at mchess.io/donut - you can also set up an AI or online game on the site. This is all indie dev work from a couple friends and myself.
Nov 2025 · mchess.io
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I had an idea on a competition in a highly constrained environment: 32x32 matrix, with bots running code you write! The live site is https://kingofthegrid.com/. Each bot emulates Z80 CPU and they all get equal execution time, so the most efficient algorithm wins. Bots can move, eat, clone themselves, and most importantly, survive the competition. Each submission, leaderboard is re-calculated, such that each participant has a match against each other, and the bot that makes the most wins gets to the top. It includes includes an online in-browser IDE:…
2025 · github.com
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Hello, This is something I've wanted to build for awhile (first bought the domain in 2020 (then lost it for a year+)). It's a tactics solver on each new tab page. There are 5 modes of play: Easy (<1200 elo) Medium (1200-1800) Hard (1800-2400) Expert (2400+) Speedrun (solve as many puzzles as possible in 60 seconds). I'm having a ton of fun with it, and definitely noticing improvements with actual games (definitely solved the most puzzles in my life while developing this extension). If you check it out, please let me know what you think. Any feedback is good!
Apr 2026 · leetchess.com
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2021 · botwars.io
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