What Is the Takes Puzzle?
The Takes puzzle gives you a small board filled with enemy pieces and one attacker. Your job is to capture every single piece on the board. The catch is that you have to do it in the right order. If you pick the wrong piece to take first, you will get stuck and have no legal move left before the board is clear.
It sounds like a simple task. You see pieces, you take them. But once you start playing, you realize that the order matters a lot. Some paths through the board lead to dead ends. One wrong choice early on can make it impossible to finish, even if you have pieces left to take.
This is what makes the Takes puzzle so satisfying to solve. There is a specific sequence that works, and finding it feels genuinely good.
The Basic Idea
Your attacker can only move the way that piece normally moves in chess. If your attacker is a rook, it moves along rows and columns. If it is a bishop, it moves diagonally. A queen can do both, and a knight jumps in its usual L shape.
After each capture, your piece lands on that square and becomes the new attacker from that position. So your starting position changes with every move. This is why the order matters so much. The piece you just captured determines where you are, and where you are determines what you can take next.
How to Think About It
The most useful habit you can build is looking at the whole board before you make a single move. Try to spot pieces that can only be reached from one direction or from one specific square. These are the pieces that will cause problems. If you save them for too late, you may find that your attacker cannot reach them anymore because you already moved away from the only square that had access.
Think of those hard to reach pieces as anchor points. Plan your route so that you pass through the squares that give you access to those pieces at the right time.
Another useful habit is counting. Before you commit to a move, ask yourself how many pieces are still reachable from where you will land after this capture. If the answer is zero and the board is not clear, you have found a dead end. Back up and try a different starting capture.
Easy, Medium, and Hard
The difficulty setting changes how many pieces are on the board and how tightly they are arranged. Easy puzzles give you a forgiving layout where several different starting captures will all work. Medium puzzles start to introduce pieces placed in awkward spots that limit your options. Hard puzzles often have layouts where only one starting piece and one specific sequence will clear the board completely.
If you are new to the puzzle, start on easy and pay attention to how your route develops naturally. Once you can finish easy boards without undoing moves, try medium. The patterns you learn on easy boards carry over.
Common Mistakes
The most common mistake is starting with the piece that looks most obvious. Often the piece right in the center of the board feels like the natural starting point, but it may be reachable from many angles and is not the piece you need to prioritize. The pieces on the edges and corners tend to have fewer access routes, so they are more likely to be the ones you need to plan around.
Another common mistake is not using the undo button. This puzzle is designed for exploration. There is no penalty for undoing moves. Use it freely. Try one path, see if it works, and if it does not, back up and try something different. The puzzle is not testing your memory. It is testing your ability to find the right sequence, and undoing is part of that process.
Why This Puzzle Trains Real Chess Skills
Thinking through piece mobility and routing is something strong chess players do all the time, even if they do not call it that. When a grandmaster calculates a long sequence of moves, they are constantly tracking where each piece will end up and what it will be able to do from there.
The Takes puzzle forces you to do exactly that kind of thinking in a focused and manageable setting. You are not dealing with kings or checks or any of the other complexities of a full chess game. You are just tracking movement and access.
This makes it a surprisingly good training tool for pure calculation. If you can reliably solve hard Takes puzzles without undoing many moves, you are developing genuine tactical vision that will serve you in real chess games.
Tips for Solving Faster
Once you are comfortable with the puzzle, you can start trying to solve it with as few undos as possible. Here are a few habits that help.
Before touching anything, trace a rough mental path through the board. Start from the piece that looks hardest to reach and work backwards. Where would you need to be to take that piece? How do you get there?
When you find a path that reaches every piece, check it once more before you start moving. Make sure you are not missing a piece tucked in a corner that your path skips.
Finally, do not rush. The puzzle is timed on some settings, but accuracy is more important than speed. A clean solution with no undos will always feel better than a scrambled solution that required twenty resets.
Keep Practicing
The Takes puzzle has a new layout every day. Each day brings a different arrangement and a different sequence to find. Some days the answer comes to you right away. Other days you will sit and think for a while before the path becomes clear.
Either way, the practice is good for you. Every time you work through the logic of capture order, you are building the kind of systematic thinking that makes you a stronger chess player overall. Give it a try today and see how many moves it takes you to find the solution.