Goose Chess

Game Rules:

Goose chess is chess with a twist: There are multiple goose pieces on the board.

Goose pieces are initialized at random positions and will move randomly to any unoccupied adjacent space. There are two geese at the start of the game, and a new goose is added for every three pieces taken, until there are nine geese on the board.

Goose pieces act as a third party and will block any form of movement. If a goose piece is completely surrounded they will capture one of the surrounding pieces.

To win in goose chess, the opposing king must be captured. Check and checkmate do not exist, as the player can utilize goose pieces to block checks. Don't accidentally blunder your king!

Why??

Over the last few months several of us have gotten obsessed with chess but at a certain point the game became stale. We theorized this is because chess is a very logical game, one that lacks a randomness. That's why we came up with the idea for goose chess - essentially chess with significantly increased RNG!

Technologies

We decided to go with react for our frontend because it's a popular framework and none of us had very much experience with it so we wanted to learn (this ended up being a trial by fire). https://github.com/Evanz142/goose-chess

Our backend is built on top of a node.js server running with web sockets. https://github.com/Tyler16/goose-chess-backend

Challenges and Accomplishments

This project was different from anything any of us have ever made before. We are all freshmen and several team members had minimal coding experience before this year, so we learned a significant amount during the hackathon.

We grouped the challenges and accomplishments together because to be honest, every part of this project was a challenge and every part was an accomplishment. We are all very proud that we were able to go from knowing almost nothing about react.js and node.js servers to creating a fully-functioning custom multiplayer chess variant.

What's next for Goose Chess

We had a TON of ideas that we were unable to implement before time ran out. The most important is setting up SSL for the server so that we can host the website for everyone to play on. Since our server was http and not https we couldn't figure out how to connect it to a online host, meaning that we can only run it locally.

Some other ideas included:

Allowing users to customize the goose spawn rates/locations
Giving the geese names to display on the side
Ability to create game invite links

Built based on tutorial written by Talha Awan

The tutorial helped us with displaying the chess board and some of the piece logic, but those were the only things that were implemented by Talha. Everything else was written by us (home page, goose features, castling & en passant, multiplayer capabilities, etc).

Check out the tutorial here!