News Chess puzzles for everyone, not just tablet owners
Chess puzzles for everyone, not just tablet owners
Remarkable Chess started with a very specific idea. I had a reMarkable tablet, I liked solving chess puzzles, and I wanted the two to work together. So I made puzzle sets that fit the screen edge to edge, one puzzle per page, the answer on the next.
That still works, and it still works well. But somewhere along the way it became clear that the tablet was never really the point.
The puzzles were the point
The thing people actually liked was the format. A clean board. One question. Take your time. Write your move down. Turn the page.
That is not a tablet feature. That is just a good way to solve a puzzle. It works on paper, on a train, at the kitchen table, in a waiting room. It works on an iPad, on any e-ink reader that opens a PDF, or printed out and folded into a coat pocket.
When the site was built around one device, it quietly told everyone else that this wasn't for them. That felt wrong. Anyone should be able to enjoy chess puzzles like these. You shouldn't need a particular gadget, and you shouldn't need to be a serious chess player either.
So the name means something different now
Remarkable Chess now means what it sounds like: chess is remarkable. It is a game with a few simple rules and an endless supply of small, satisfying problems. A good chess puzzle feels a lot like a good crossword clue. It looks impossible, then it clicks, and you can't unsee it.
That is the new tagline, too. Like a crossword, but chess.
What changed
Belts instead of ratings. Difficulty used to be labelled with chess terms like "Club" and "Expert", plus a rating range. Those mean a lot to chess players and very little to everyone else. Now the levels are belts, like karate: White, Yellow, Orange, Brown and Black. If you have never solved a chess puzzle, start with White belt. If you know your Lichess or Chess.com puzzle rating, the puzzles page tells you which belt matches.
Print first. Every set prints on A4 or Letter with "fit to page". The boards are pure black and white, so any home printer handles them, and nothing gets lost in grey.
Any tablet. The pages are still 3:4, so they still fill a reMarkable screen edge to edge. They also open in any PDF app on an iPad, an Android tablet or an e-ink reader. If your tablet takes a pen, you can write your moves right on the page.
A friendlier look. The site is brighter now, and set in a typeface built for readability, which also happens to tell a zero from the letter O. That matters more than you'd think in chess notation.
A puzzle a day. The front page now has a daily puzzle. One position, one move to find, and a button to check your answer. It is a small taste of what a set feels like.
What is coming
Printed puzzle books. Proper ones, the kind you can buy, keep on a shelf and work through with a pencil, in the same spirit as a sudoku or a puzzle book you'd pick up at a bookshop. They are in the works. If you'd like to hear when they are ready, the sign-up form at the bottom of this page sends an email now and then, nothing else.
What stays the same
The puzzles still come from the Lichess open database, played and rated by real people. Every set is still 100 hand-picked puzzles, one per page, with the answer on the next. There are still free sets at every belt, with no account and no signup needed.
And if you came here for the reMarkable sets, they are all still here. They just have more company now.