Chess puzzles — find the best move ▶ Play now — 4,600+ puzzles, no sign-up
Guide updated October 2026 · Runs via WebAssembly (native port)
Each puzzle starts from a real game at the moment one side made a mistake. The opponent's move is played for you; then it's your turn to find the move that punishes it — a fork, a pin, a mate, a winning exchange. Get it right and the opponent replies, and you keep going until the combination is complete. The puzzles come from the Lichess puzzle database, which its authors release into the public domain, and each one has been played and rated by thousands of people.
Controls — what does what
| Action | Keyboard | Mouse / touch |
|---|---|---|
| Move a piece | — | Drag it, or click it then the square |
| Get a hint | — | Hint circles the piece to move |
| Next puzzle | — | Next puzzle |
FREE This is the complete game, free. Every puzzle, every rating band, no daily limit — the puzzles are public domain (CC0) and the board is open source.
Puzzles: Lichess puzzle database, CC0. Board: chessground (GPL-3.0); rules: chess.js (BSD-2). This page's code is GPL-3.0 — see NOTICE.md. The selection is built by scripts/build-chess.mjs --puzzles.
How the rating works
You start at 1200. Every puzzle has its own rating, and the next one is chosen close to yours. Solve a puzzle on the first try, without a hint, and your rating goes up — more for a puzzle rated above you, less for one below. A wrong move, a hint or Show solution counts as a miss and lowers it. It's the same Elo arithmetic chess ratings use, so after twenty or thirty puzzles the number settles around where you really are.
Your rating, streak and the puzzles you've already seen are stored in this browser only.
What's in the set
About 4,600 puzzles, 220 in every hundred-point band from 600 to 2700, chosen for being popular, well-tested and stable in rating. The themes shown under the board — mate in 2, fork, pin, discovered attack, back-rank mate and so on — come from the database's own tagging, so you can see what kind of idea you're looking for once you've found it. Each puzzle links back to its page on lichess.org if you want to see the game it came from.
Tips
Check every capture and every check first — most tactics start with one of them. Look for undefended pieces and for pieces that are defending two things at once. In a mate puzzle, any move that delivers checkmate counts, even if it isn't the one in the database.
Frequently asked questions
Where do the puzzles come from?
From the Lichess puzzle database, which is published under CC0 (public domain). We host a selection of about 4,600 of its six million puzzles, spread evenly across the rating range.
Why did my rating go down when I used a hint?
A hint, a wrong move or Show solution counts as not solving the puzzle unaided, so the rating treats it as a miss. You can still finish the puzzle afterwards.
Will I see the same puzzle twice?
Not until you have worked through the puzzles near your rating; the page remembers the last 1,500 you've seen in this browser.
More you can play in your browser
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Want a game like this on your own site?
Chess puzzles isn't ours to give away — we host it, we didn't write it. But eleven of the games here we did write from scratch, and those are free for anyone to put on their own page: one line of HTML, no account, no permission, no attribution beyond a credit line.