How to Play

Supported controls:

• Cardboard 1.0-type magnetic slider button (tested with RIEM2 headset & Nexus 6P)
  • Magnetic slider is disabled by default. To enable it, look forward and upward, select the “enable magnetic trigger” checkbox, and select it using the trigger.
  • The checkbox will ALWAYS respond to the magnetic trigger, regardless of whether or not the checkbox itself is selected. If you can’t get the checkbox to select, the problem is that your trigger isn’t being recognized.
• Cardboard 2.0-type capacitive touchscreen lever
• Most normal “PC” USB Gamepads (via OTG adapter). Tested with Logitech F310 in “X” mode.
• Any “normal” bluetooth gamepad supported by Android (tip: must be in “gamepad” mode, not “mouse” or “media control” mode)
• In a pinch, you can also touch the screen directly.

How to play:

1. Launch the game. Current preview releases launch directly into the game. You can reset the chessboard by looking to the right & clicking “Restart Game” (aim reticle dot at the button, and press the headset trigger or any button on the gamepad)
2. Select a piece to move:
   1. Focus on the piece by aiming the reticle dot at the desired piece. The reticle dot will grow into a circle, and the square will be highlighted yellow. Note you can only focus on pieces you’re allowed to move. Other squares are ignored, and the reticle will remain a dot when pointing at them.
   2. Trigger the selection. Press and release the desired control button (magnetic trigger, capacitive lever, or “any” button on a supported gamepad. Once you’ve triggered a piece, it will be lifted from the board.
      1. In order for magnetic trigger to work, your phone must have a real gyroscope. Many Android phones merely pretend to have a gyro & fake it by integrating the accelerometer readings with the magnetometer’s readings… the same magnetometer used by the magnetic button.
      2. Magnetic trigger buttons are notoriously finicky and unreliable, even under the best of conditions. Ideally, you should press the magnetic trigger as quickly and completely as possible, then allow it to snap back as quickly as possible.
      3. Google officially abolished support for magnetic trigger buttons in GoogleVR. Pawnslaught’s magnetic trigger button support was written “by hand”, through direct experimentation with a Nexus 6P and REIM2 headpiece. There’s a very good chance it won’t work well (or at all) with other phones or headpieces. The fact that Pawnslaught supports magnetic triggers at all is mainly a testament to its author’s stubbornness & determination to make it work anyway.
3. Focus on the desired target space (occupied or empty), then press & release the trigger.
   1. Triggering a piece you own as the target makes THAT piece the currently selected piece. Triggering the piece you had selected in the first place simply returns it to the board so you can select another.
   2. The reticle color changes after you press the trigger, and again after you release it. You must press AND release a button to register as a triggering event. If for some reason the button press only “half-registers”, just press and release it again.
4. It can take a few seconds for the computer to decide on its next move (especially after the first few moves). While the computer is busy thinking, the reticle pointer will rapidly change colors to reassure you that the program is still alive & hasn’t crashed (we’ve never actually seen the chess engine crash — it’s pretty rock-solid and stable — but it’s disconcerting to stare at an unchanging screen for 30-60 seconds… or even something you KNOW is just a lifeless cycling animation. Rest assured that the reticle colors displayed while the computer is thinking really, truly DO reflect actual evidence of the chess engine busily working to humiliate and defeat you).

Other notes:

• When your king is in check, you’ll hear a groan at the start of your turn, and the king’s piece will be surrounded by a black aura of death skulls.
• When your king is in check, the game will not allow you to make any move that fails to get your king out of check.
• When you select a piece, the green-highlighted squares show you where the piece would be allowed to move according to the normal rules of chess for that piece. However, no move is complete until the chess engine approves it. If your move fails to get your in-check king out of check, it will be rejected, the move will be canceled, you’ll hear an error beep, and that square will be unselectable until after you’ve made your next valid & approved move.
• Pawnslaught fully supports castling, en-passant, and pawn promotion.