About Spot the Mate

Every day there are eight new checkmate puzzles here, arranged from easy to hard. The day changes at midnight where you are.

Each puzzle comes from one of the chess puzzle books by Ansel Vreede, and the card under each solved puzzle tells you which book it is from.

How the puzzles are checked

Every puzzle has exactly one first move that forces checkmate. Each solution was checked by exhaustive search and confirmed again by a chess engine. When a puzzle takes more than one move, the site plays your opponent's reply for you.

The mate map

After you find the mate, the board shows a mate map: a dashed ring where the mating piece started, a round ring around the piece that gives mate, a square frame around the mated king, and crosses on the squares the king cannot reach. A red tint marks a square the king cannot move to because the piece there is protected, and a grey tint marks a square blocked by the king's own piece. The marks are shapes as well as colours, so they still work in black and white.

Privacy

There are no accounts and no cookies. Your progress is saved only in your own browser.

Credits

Chess pieces: the Cburnett set by Colin M.L. Burnett, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0. Puzzle positions are drawn from the Lichess puzzle database, which is released under CC0.

Text on this site was written with the help of AI tools. Every position and every solution is checked by computer.