Show HN: SpicyChess – A Chess tactics training app based on spaced repetition

[creature_x]

https://spicychess.com

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 !

[pushfoo]

1. Where is the bookmarking feature? The star next to the score doesn't seem to do anything. If it's an icon to indicate score, it would be clearer to use a different icon.

2. For consistency, I'd use text headings at the top left of the time and score boxes, or at the very least put the icons on the left.

3. The 'View Solution' animation playback is confusingly fast. I'd add a step-by-step playback with forward/backward buttons as the default mode. You could still offer a checkbox to enable auto-playback, and a slider to adjust playback speed.

4. Since this seems to be based on the same toolkit Lichess uses, using the same color behavior for moves would be helpful.

5. Please offer a checkbox to enable showing possible moves when pieces are clicked like Lichess does.

[creature_x → pushfoo]

1. The bookmarking feature is a floppy disk icon that appears on the right side of the page once you finish solving a puzzle.

2. Noted - I'll look into this - Thank you!

3. You're right, I can definitely make the animation slower (:

4. Noted - I'll look into this - Thank you!

5. This is actually on my todo list so I'll definitely add this in soon.

[sinuhe69]

I like the concept! But I believe to make it work better, the repetition should not just of the same puzzle but of the same theme/patter (last rank attack, fork, overloading etc…). Yes, the strict time constraint seems to work for me, but 15 seconds is too short for me to verify any idea, thus I could only react instinctively, which is quite bad in chess.

There are some bugs in the program, for example you said on loop 6, the time should be 30 s, but it was only 15 and the loop count was still 1. And it definitely needs a saving/synching feature because even now, one will lose his status just by refreshing the browser.

[creature_x → sinuhe69]

Hi! You should have ten minutes to solve a puzzle on your first "loop". Once you finish solving all puzzles in a given loop, you will have 5 minutes on your next attempt. I'm curious if you're actually seeing 15 seconds ?

[sinuhe69 → creature_x]

Another issue are two bugs: On this particular quizz, the solution is simply wrong. I can not make reference for that simple because there is no ref number. So only FEN: 8/p2r1p1k/1p2pQpp/2qr4/5P2/1P2P2R/P5PP/4R1K1 w - - 0 1 (Screenshot in the link above)

The app said the solution was not Rxh6+, but it IS. The other issue is when you click on the magnifier icon, it will land on a wrong puzzle (at least on this particular puzzle). So I think your data has at least some problems. A report button would be useful.

[sinuhe69 → creature_x]

Yes, many time. In this video I documented 2 issues: solution replay is too fast, and 15s quizzes like I said.

https://imgur.com/a/NTo2cO1

[creature_x → sinuhe69]

Thank you so much for the screenshots; they really helped. If you refresh the page the countdown time should be fixed but I'm very curious about the loop number that you're seeing on the /train page ? Does it say: Loop 1 of 6 ?

[sinuhe69 → creature_x]

Yes, it was loop 1/6 but the time for the quizzes already reduced to 15 s. That’s was what I talked about. By the way, I used Safari on iOS.