Behold the Wonders of ClueChess

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(Note that cluechess.com is under rapid development - for the most recent updates you may need to type Control-F5 to refresh your browser)

(Also note that you should be able to choose the King from the piece selection box by scrolling horizontally to the right)

(Oh, also: this site probably isn't particularly mobile-friendly yet, sorry)

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Introduction

Hello, my name is John Chernoff and some of you may know me as ZugAddict here on lichess.org, either for chess reasons (unlikely, but possible) or as the creator of molechess.com, or even more obscurely, as the author of the Ballad of Hans Niemann. Regardless, this blog is an attempt to introduce and explain a new, even dorkier website I've been working on, namely cluechess.com.

Origin

A few years ago I experimented with a way to display a chessboard as a "heat map" of controlled squares, the result of which was ChessMatrix:

Recently, however, IM Joshua Posthuma suggested I make a game out of that, and thus over the course of the last week did ClueChess come into being:

Rules

The rules are very simple: discover the identity of the missing pieces. For now, you get five guesses per puzzle. The "clues" are, other than chess guesswork and savvy, the colors of squares which reflect control over the board by both sides. In the above image, the more white pieces controlling a square, the yellower it will be, and the more black pieces controlling a square the more blue it will be. If both sides control a square, the colors mix in different ways, the default for now being an "additive" mixture similar to how light combines.

Tips

After toying with this for awhile now, I've found that it's difficult to tell exactly how much influence a side has over a square simply from the colors, which is partly by design - knowing exactly how many pieces each side has controlling a square makes the deductions almost trivial. However, it you get stuck there's a compromise with the "Show Control Numbers" checkbox which will show cumulative control over a square, i.e., both sides degree of control combined (thus if Black controls a square twice and White once, the number displayed is -1). Also useful to bear in mind is the positions themselves are taken from a database of lichess puzzles, so there's some deductions that can be made on that basis as well.

Please let me know if this is even remotely fun to play - we have a discord for the game here: https://discord.gg/XutMjUD7jY

Cheers,

- Zug