Welcome, friend.

If you found this page from cut scene 1 of Hungry Horses by Grouper Games, then we admire and applaud your curiosity. Perhaps we can present some information about the game as a small reward of sorts. We hope you find it interesting.

A vastly simplified version Hungry Horses was intended to be a mini-game inside of a more ambitious project we hoped to make, but after realizing we didn't have the budget, we decided to stylize and expand the mini-game. The name of the more ambitious project appears in the final cut scene.

We found a real-life legend to inspire the story of Hungry Horses. There's an Easter Egg in the game which reveals the legend. It is Easter Egg #1.

About Easter Eggs one and two:

Easter Egg #1 - Step on an attacked square 19 times during a puzzles, in honor of the year 1900.

Easter Egg #2 - Similar to #1, but with a special cabbage piece. Easter Egg #2, gives a very obscure hint about an old cartoon related to the stylizing of some of our pieces. We'll be very flattered and impressed if someone goes through the trouble of decoding it.

Easter Egg #3 - Look for a special thing that sometimes appears in puzzles during Quests.

Easter Egg 99 - If you're a very, very, very bad player, you'll likely find this

Scoring

A word about scoring in the Quest: On the two apple levels, each puzzle is worth 20 points. On all others, 30 points, except for the final level, on which its two puzzles are worth 100 points. There's a 2 point penalty for every misstep and every additional move beyond the optimal number.

On the Sunflower and Peppermint Wilderness levels, you get a time bonus of one point per half-second remaining for finishing within 25 seconds. So it's out of 50 points. On the final level, it's 90 seconds. So it's out of 180 points.

Score titles are as follow: 40 - fish, 100 - patzer, 200 - noob, 400 - beginner, 600 - wood pusher, 800 - dabbler, 1000 - hobbyist, 1200 - devotee, 1400 - journeyman, 1600 - ace, 1800 - cracker jack, 2000 - expert, 2200 - chess master, 2400 - grandmaster, 2600 - Super GM, 2800 - Super Duper GM, 3000 - Cyborg, 9000 - Wizard.

The maximum theoretical score in a normal playthrough (if you finish all timed puzzles in an impossible quarter second) is 3160.

Misc

No puzzles are stored within our app. They are all generated. We tweaked our algorithm to make puzzle positions all look like plausible positions from real chess games.

The game depicted in cut scene 1 is from a real online blitz game played by the game's creator.

Quest leaderboards are monthly. Daily puzzle leaderboards are daily.

Only your first attempt at a daily puzzle is eligible for the leaderboard. The horse head in the lower right corner lets you know that your current attempt is eligible.

Practice mode keeps track of the number of optimal results versus the number of attempts for the current config settings, so it can be used to administer a challenge to chess students.

Lastly, thank you!

We hope you're enjoying our game, and we hope we have the opportunity to make two more and share them with you.

Sincerely,
the Hungry Horses Team at Grouper Games