Coach Owl's Family Checkmate Quest

You don't need to be a chess player to share this one. Coach Owl leads your child through levels of one-move checkmates, and every answer is a picture: turn the page and the winning move is drawn right on the board. 100 puzzles, ages 7-12, a certificate at the end.

If you only half-remember how the knight moves, that is fine. Every answer page is a mate map: a dashed ring shows where the winning piece came from, a round ring circles it where it landed, a square frame marks the trapped king, and small crosses mark the squares he wished he could run to. The marks are shapes, not just colours, so they read just as clearly on a black-and-white Kindle. Grown-ups can read it at a glance, so the two of you can talk through why it works - and settle who spotted it first.

The 100 puzzles are a quest in three levels. You start at the castle gates in Warm-Up, cross the courtyard in Steady, and climb the King's Tower in Challenge. Coach Owl opens each level with a short lesson and his favourite routine: find the king first, then ask three questions - can he run, can something block, can something take? Every level ends with a Boss puzzle, and when you clear the last one together, a Checkmate Champion certificate is waiting at the end of the book.

Coach Owl mixes the puzzles on purpose: two in a row never use the same kind of piece for the winning move (rooks and queens count as one), so kids solve each one by looking at the board, not by copying the last answer.

Every puzzle comes from a real game and has exactly one first move that forces mate - proved by exhaustive search, then checked again by a separate chess engine. If a second move also worked, the puzzle was thrown out. So when your child finds the answer, it is the answer, and nobody at the table has to wonder about a second solution.

The difficulty is honest, too. Every puzzle carries a real difficulty rating between 400 and 649 on the standard online puzzle scale - the gentle end of real chess. No rating required to start: if your child knows how the pieces move, you are both ready.

A gentle hint sits under every diagram for the days when the move will not come, and the answer is always on the very next page - no hunting in the back of the book.

Made for screens: each puzzle fills the screen on its own, with big, clear diagrams and board coordinates that read easily on a Kindle, a phone or a tablet. Ready for a few puzzles after dinner, on the couch, or on a long car ride.

Checkmate in one is the first real chess skill - the moment a child stops pushing pieces and starts hunting kings. This book lets you be right there when it happens.