Penguin Chess Engine

Engine for a simple game written in Rust WASM with React

Penguin Chess is a game that a friend of mine invented.

\(\rightarrow\) Click here to access the game engine! \(\leftarrow\)

The rules are very simple. The game is played on a 5x5 board where each player has 4 pawns and one king. Any piece can move in any of the 8 directions but must move until there is an obstacle (either a piece or the edge of the board). It’s disallowed for a pawn to move to the center square. The game is won when a player moves their king to the center square.

Originally, the author had the kings and pawns on the same side, but it turns out there’s a 7-move winning strategy by the first player, so as a variant, the kings are swapped. My friend wondered if this is a more interesting game now, so I made an engine to search for any obvious winning moves.

Indeed there aren’t any winning moves in sight. But one must still be very careful because it’s very easy to make a wrong move and lose quickly.

Source Code

The project’s source code is at https://github.com/hpmv/penguin-chess.