Portugues
The Last Pawn
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About the game
The Last Pawn turns chess upside down. The board is an eight-by-eight chessboard, but it is almost empty, and you are the only piece you control: one small black pawn. Against you comes the white army, a few pieces at a time, and they move exactly as chess pieces do: knights jump, bishops slide along the diagonals, rooks run down the files, and pawns advance and, if they reach the end of the board, are promoted. One turn of yours is one turn of theirs, so it works like a puzzle: look at the board, work out where each piece can land and take the one square on which you survive.
You cannot capture whenever you want. A bar at the top of the screen fills as you play, and when it is full, moving into an enemy piece takes it, and its points go onto your score. Until then, the only things you can do are step aside and wait. That tension, between running and the moment when you can bite back, is the game. The longer you last, the more pieces turn up, and the whole run ends when something catches you.
Gabriel Edradan made it with React, Redux and Sass, and drew the pieces, the board and the title himself as SVG. It has three difficulty settings and an option that paints the squares the enemy can reach next, so you can learn by looking before you play without help.
Playing it here
Click Play, then PLAY in the menu. You are the black pawn. Press W, A, S or D to move one square up, left, down or right, or swipe in that direction on a touchscreen; press the space bar, or tap, to stay where you are and pass the turn. How to play shows the same controls in the game, and Options sets the difficulty (Easy, Normal or Hard) and turns the danger indicators on or off. The button at the top right restarts the run and the cross returns to the menu. Nothing is saved between visits.
Controls
| Input | Action |
|---|---|
| W / A / S / D | move one square up / left / down / right |
| swipe (touchscreen) | move in the direction of the swipe |
| Space or tap | pass the turn |
| move into an enemy when the bar is full | capture it |
| circular arrow / cross (top right) | restart / back to the menu |
A few things worth knowing
Read the indicators. Turn the danger indicators on until you know by heart how each piece moves. Knights are the trickiest, because they can land on squares that look far away.
Passing is a move. If every square next to you is dangerous, staying put is often safer than stepping into the open. It also lets the bar fill up.
Keep your back to the edge. The edges of the board take away squares that enemies can use to reach you, and they also take away yours. Corners are usually a trap.
Credits and licence
The Last Pawn was created by Gabriel Edradan (gbrln) and is released under the MIT licence; the licence text is linked from this page. The game's lettering uses the font Concert One, by Johan Kallas and Mihkel Virkus, under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, whose text is included with the game. The pieces and the interface are the author's own SVG drawings, and the game has no audio.