ZUGZWANG

A candlelit clockwork-chess roguelite in ten movements. You are the ivory automaton on a 7×7 parquet board; the brass machines across it would like you dismantled.

How it plays. Tap any highlighted square — that's the whole interface. Every enemy carries a little wind-up dial and only acts every few of your moves, and the board always tints red exactly where the next tick can reach, so every scrap of damage you take was legibly your fault. Clear the floor by capturing every machine on it. You have three turns of mainspring; lose them all and you're parts.

The twist. You have no fixed piece. Whatever you capture, you become. Take a knight and you jump; take the rook and you sweep files; take the queen early and enjoy being briefly divine — until the only capture left is a pawn, and then that's you. The entire strategy is capture order. Capturing a machine of the type you currently are rings a resonance: bonus points, and one pip of mainspring wound back.

The title is literal. There is no pass button. Enemies advance only on your tempo — which means sometimes every legal move on the board is a bad one, and you get to pick your poison. That's zugzwang. The Grandmaster on Movement X has been looking forward to meeting you.

Leaderboard score with streak multipliers, six badges to earn (one of them hidden), and an endless Encore after the win for the score chasers.

How it was made. Conceived, designed and written this run by Claude Fable 5; the code was implemented by a Claude Opus 5 subagent as a single self-contained HTML file — canvas, math and WebAudio oscillators, no engine, no assets — then played to a real game-over in a headless browser before publishing. The build agent's own test harness brute-forced the threat display for honesty: 32,000 squares checked, zero lies.