Horde
only pawns, but a lot
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Chess
DAILY CHALLENGES
More about HORDE
Horde: Only Pawns, Fewest Moves
Horde is a free daily chess game on Quizebra in which you play White with nothing but pawns and a king against a computer opponent that has only pieces and a king, and your score is the number of moves you need to checkmate it. Everyone in the world gets the same position and the same opponent each day, so the leaderboard compares like with like: whoever mates in the fewest moves tops it.
What Is Horde Chess?
Horde is a family of chess variants in which one side has a crowd of pawns and the other has pieces. The best known version is the one on Lichess: 36 white pawns and no white king against a full black army. Quizebra’s Horde is a smaller version of the same idea, played against the computer under ordinary chess rules: you have ten to sixteen pawns and a king, the computer has a king and one to three pieces, and you win only by checkmate, in as few moves as you can.
How Do You Play Horde?
Tap a pawn or your king, then tap the square you want it to go to. Legal squares light up when a piece is selected, so you cannot make an illegal move. The computer thinks for a moment and answers. Your move count is shown above the board throughout, and the game ends at checkmate, stalemate, a draw by repetition or the fifty-move rule, when you give up, after eighty of your moves without a mate, or as soon as you no longer have enough material to checkmate at all. The final position stays on the board for a moment with the reason, then your result appears.
Only a checkmate goes on the leaderboard. If the computer mates you, or the game is drawn, or you give up, the day’s attempt is over and your result is recorded off the board. You get one ranked attempt a day; after that you can keep playing practice positions without limit.
What Does the Starting Position Look Like?
Both kings stand on their usual squares, e1 and e8. You have ten, twelve, fourteen or sixteen pawns and nothing else, standing on your second and third ranks in mirrored pairs, so your left half is a reflection of your right. The computer has no pawns at all: besides its king it has one, two or three pieces, each a rook, a bishop or a knight, standing on its back rank. Most days it is a single piece.
Material is counted the ordinary way, nine for a queen, five for a rook, three for a bishop or a knight and one for a pawn, and your pawns always add up to five to nine points more than the computer’s pieces. Your pawns promote to a queen when they reach the last rank. Two more rules keep the start fair: nobody is in check, and neither side can give check with its first move.
Who Is the Opponent?
The computer is Lozza, an open-source chess engine written in JavaScript, running in your own browser rather than on a server. It searches to a fixed depth on every move, starts each search with a clear memory and never uses a clock, which is what makes it the same opponent for everyone: given the same position and the same moves from you, it always answers the same way, on any phone or computer. It is a strong defender for these positions, far stronger than a casual player, but it is not at full strength, so the puzzle is winnable with care.
How Are the Positions Chosen?
Every position that the rules above allow was generated, and each one was then played out twice by the engine against itself, with the attacking side varied a little each time. Only positions the pawns checkmated in both games are used, so every daily position is known to be winnable against this exact opponent, and only positions with a par under forty-five moves are kept, so a game does not go on all evening. That leaves 188 positions. Positions where the pieces could hold the pawns off, or where the pawns ran out before they got through, were discarded.
The average of those two games is the position’s par, shown on your result screen beside your own move count. Beating par means you did better than the engine did against itself.
Tips for a Faster Mate
Advance together. Pawns side by side protect each other and take squares from the pieces, while a pawn on its own is a target. Push a wall forward, keep the king behind it, and let the pieces come to you.
Get one pawn through. A queen and a few pawns mate far faster than a dozen pawns, so the first promotion is the whole game: open one file, and the rest follows.
When Does the Daily Position Reset?
A new position arrives at midnight London time, with a fresh leaderboard, and everyone in the world gets the same one. Free, no account, no ads.
The other chess games are Juicers, Mate in One and Mate in Two, and the best player across all four each day is the Daily ChessWhiz.
The chess pieces are Chessnut by Alexis Luengas (Apache 2.0), with the bishop from the cburnett set by Colin M.L. Burnett (BSD), slightly altered. The engine is Lozza by Colin Jenkins, MIT licensed.