I love hearing that non chess fans are finding it fun, we tried to make it more simple, more fun, but also challenging? So to hear that is really awesome. And yes, coding the Chess AI was difficult. Jacob on our team spent most of his time working on that and in the last several days of the jam he was building test scenarios for board states that could break the AIs brain and tweaking it til it worked, so major props to him.
He ended up coding like a blundering coefficient even so that the early rounds the AI consistently plays bad lol.
Also thanks for playing the whole way through, we added those bonus stages for the players who wanted that extra challenge. I think Jacob set the AI to max settings for the last stage, so you beat our best stuff (for now!)
For the suggestions, totally right about the piece moves. We were thinking maybe like an extended hover tooltip would be good, or like a key press for info? And for the story, also yeah, we really planned out the first seven stages and the last three just were cobbled together at the end. Hope to address that in the post jam touch up a bit.
But thanks for completing our game and giving great feedback, means a ton!