Updates to Puzzle Academy

Puzzle Academy now includes new features to review your recent activity, resume workouts, and view improved statistics.

Review Recent Activity

There is a new panel on the Puzzle Academy dashboard displaying your recent activity. It shows your most recent unlocks, workouts, and masteries. The button "More" leads to a longer list. Unlocks and workouts include a link to the review page, where you can see a list of the puzzles played, allowing you to review each puzzle.

Resuming workouts

If you close your browser window, or turn off your device while playing a workout, you can now resume this workout later. Any incomplete workout is displayed on the Puzzle Academy dashboard, allowing you to continue from where you left off. You can also continue on a different device: For example, you can start a workout on your PC, and continue it on your phone later.

Improved statistics

Puzzle Academy has always offered detailed statistics on all skills and your performance with each one. Simply press the "All statistics" button at the bottom of the dashboard to view them.

If you have unlocked a lot of skills, the statistics page can become quite long and overwhelming. The statistics page now has additional options at the top to quickly analyze your strengths and weaknesses:

• Filter skills: Choose from showing all skills, or only skills that you have mastered, are in your workout, can be upgraded, or unlocked.
• Sort by: Sort the list by your best skills (highest solved percentage), by level (highest unlocked level), by worst skills (highest failure percentage), or by performance. Performance refers to your rating over the last 20 puzzles you solved using that skill.
• Group by: Select to group by course, or select no group to see all skills in one list.

For example, to see the skills you are struggling with most in your workout, filter by "workout", sort by "worst", and group by "none".

Here you can see that I am struggling with some deflection skills. However, my performance rating isn’t too bad, which means the puzzles are quite difficult. To see my strengths, I can select to sort by "performance", and group by "none":

Some checkmate combinations are my biggest strengths - I think that's because I practice this a lot when selecting our daily puzzles. Checkmate combinations are always very popular after all.

Updates to Checkmate Armageddon

Checkmate Armageddon is our action-packed game mode where you have to solve as many checkmate in one puzzles in two minutes as you can.

Improved difficulty curve

While you play Checkmate Armageddon, the puzzles get more and more difficult. Originally, we used the rating of the puzzles established in our other modes. However, the rating in the other modes does not consider the factor of time.

For this update we recalculated the difficulty of the puzzles in the context of Checkmate Armageddon, based on millions of games played. We not only took into account whether the checkmate was found, but also how long it took the player to solve this puzzle in comparison to the other puzzles played within the same run. This allowed us to recalibrate the difficulty of the entire game. The result is a smoother difficulty curve which improves the flow of the game. Puzzles you play at the start are consistently easy, and get more and more difficult the more puzzles you have played in the current run.

Here is an example of a position that has quite a low rating in our other modes, but now has a high difficulty in Checkmate Armageddon:

In Checkmate Armageddon, players often play the first check that they see very quickly, knowing that a checkmate in one move is possible. However, in this position, White has several ways to give a check, and only one of them is checkmate: 1.Bd4#, and it's is with the piece that's farther away than the queen.

Increase of maximum score to 80

Based on the improved difficulty curve, we have increased the maximum possible score for Checkmate Armageddon from 70 to 80.

Which challenge will you take on today?

Try the updated Checkmate Armageddon and see how far you get.

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