PacoPlay Year in Review 2023
Looking Back at the Games we Played in 2023

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Looking Back at the Games we Played in 2023

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Improving Post Game Analysis for Paco Ŝako

On January 18th, 2023, at 19:00 the server for PacoPlay broke and you were no longer able to play. The last game was https://pacoplay.com/game/6558 played between Yorick and Raimond. No moves were possible anymore and the timer broke. Yorick quickly ...

A fast way to search a graph: Don't search it.

We'll use flamegraphs together with the regression test suite we build in the last article to find bottlenecks in my implementation of the Paco Ŝako game that is powering pacoplay.com. Paco Ŝako is a chess variant where you can't kill any pieces. Eve...


In 2023 we played a total of 7294 games. As a community, we played every day except for Thursday the 23nd November of 2023. Overall, we played about twice as many games as last year.
| Year | Games Played |
| 2020 | 138 |
| 2021 | 1831 |
| 2022 | 3126 |
| 2023 | 7294 |
For the scope of this article, I count games with at least 5 moves played, regardless of whether the game was actually finished or not.
And if we plot this by month we can see that we were very active in spring, this is even clearer than in the heat map at the top of this article.

I hope we'll see many more games played next year and many people joining tournaments as well.
The website mostly looks the same as it did in January 2023, but it got some additions over the year.
Since September you can chose the color of the board. We have a new menu for quick settings like that. The quick settings got started in August, because playing sounds would interrupt music playback on iPhone and players asked for a way to disable that.
I added additional color options to the arrows in October.

October also brought an improved and translatable tutorial of the game, because I wanted to have this ready for SPIEL 2023.

Since November 2023, the replay view for games tells you if you missed a "Paco in 2" or correctly identified the opportunity. This is described in more detail the Paco Ŝako Mate in 2 article.
Several people now have accounts on the website and you can log in to track your games. Right now there is no open sign-up for accounts, but you can just ask me on Discord to make a login for you.
Even our AI client can play under its own name - though it still isn't ready for general use.
