Over the holiday season I've been very busy working on Puzzle Academy. Watch the video for a demo, and read on for more details.

More skills, levels, and puzzles

Puzzle Academy now includes more than 100.000 puzzles in 323 levels for learning 112 skills in 6 areas. That's 7 new skills, 52 new levels, and more than 20.000 puzzles added over the holiday season. And I've also written 63 new guides.

More guides

Over the holiday season I've added guides to all checkmate patterns. That's 31 new guides. These guides include:

• A definition of the pattern
• An explanation of the name
• Examples
• Some hints about patterns matching
• A list of related patterns

There are also 16 new guides to tactics, and 11 new guides to checkmate combinations.

There are now also introductory guides to Puzzle Academy, Puzzle Academy Practice, Fundamentals, Tactics, and Checkmate Patterns.

You can access all these guides from the Puzzle Academy dashboard, and the skill details pages.

Feedback in Puzzle Academy Practice

Puzzle Academy progress is now shown immediately after solving a puzzle.

In this screenshot, I've just solved a smothered mate in two. This puzzle is included in three Puzzle Academy levels, and I can see my progress immediately.

Example puzzles

Here are some example puzzles from the new skills:

Morphy's mate, level 2: Qd4+!

Discovered check into checkmate, level 3: Ne7+ Kb7 Nc6+ Ka8 Ra7#

Defend against check and avoid checkmate, level 3: Kh3!

There are several skills now where you have to avoid a trap.
Here you shouldn't play Kh5?, because of Rh8+ Kg6 Bf8! followed by Rh6#.
You can see the line that should be avoided on the solution page.

Become a ChessPuzzle.net Premium Member and start personalized learning with Puzzle Academy

If you want to give Puzzle Academy a try, and access the ad-free version, join Premium, and start learning.

Future development and your feedback

Development on Puzzle Academy continues.
As always your feedback is important and welcome, please contact me if you have any questions or suggestions.