Chess Brainteasers

trackstar · January 31st, 2021, 7:24 pm

Some will be quite easy; some will be quite difficult.
A thread for chess players of all abilities.
Chess Art is welcome too.

An easy one to start:

katastrofa · February 10th, 2021, 10:26 am

One I've found:

Cuchulainn · February 11th, 2021, 8:08 am

Latin Square./Cayley Table

katastrofa · February 11th, 2021, 11:54 pm

Came up with four more. It feels like my brain developed a greedy search algorithm.

trackstar · February 12th, 2021, 1:09 am

Great! Only one image of four is showing, but clearly you have found several ways to distribute the queens so they can rule the board together harmoniously. : )

I will rummage around my chess archives and come up with another brainteaser for the weekend.

trackstar · February 12th, 2021, 12:32 pm

Here is a classic dating back to 1512! I will not give you its formal name yet, so let's just call it

Switching Knights

There are 4 knights on a 3×3 chessboard: two white knights at the lower corners and two black knights at the upper corners.

What is the minimum number of moves for the white knights to wind up at the upper corners and the black knights to wind up at the lower corners?

: gknight puzzle.png (5.07 KiB) Viewed 422 times

trackstar · February 12th, 2021, 12:37 pm

If that is quite easy for you, you can also try this: same thing - all of the knights switch places - what is the minimum number of moves?

: Knights3x4.png (23.77 KiB) Viewed 417 times

trackstar · February 15th, 2021, 4:18 pm

Here are sample solutions to Guarini's Puzzle (or "Problem"), using graph theory and mapping the progress of the knights (or frogs, as the case might be).
Obviously, the Knights are constrained in their move pattern and for them, the answer is 16.