I started playing chess late in life. I won’t say exactly how late. Let’s just say I wasn’t a child prodigy…
While other children were sacrificing queens in brilliant combinations before they lost their baby teeth, I was… doing considerably less impressive things.
I only discovered chess later… much later.
Which, as it turns out, is still early enough to make spectacular blunders.
Recently, I stumbled across something called Solo Chess in the Chess.com app. And there are three modes in Solo Chess: Challenge Mode, Practice Mode, and Crazy Mode.
After dabbling in the Challenge and Practice modes for a couple of weeks, my ego became so inflated it apparently affected my brain. Because my brain whispered “I think we’re ready for the Crazy Mode“.
The description for the Crazy Mode was reassuringly modest, as you can see from the screenshot above.
Naturally, I tapped it.
For the uninitiated, Solo Chess isn’t about checkmate.
Every move must be a capture.
Every piece may only move twice.
Your objective is to eliminate every piece except one (if there is a king on the board, the king must be the last piece standing).
It sounds perfectly reasonable until your rook quietly turns black because you’ve forgotten it has already moved twice, and your entire strategy collapses around you.
If you solved the puzzle on the first attempt, you get a green tick. If it took several attempts to solve it, the tick is red.
My early attempts followed a familiar pattern.
I would spend several minutes constructing what I believed was an ingenious sequence of captures, only to discover I’d trapped myself with two lonely black pieces staring at each other across the board.
Before long, I developed a policy.
The bishops had to go.
Bishops are snipers.
Leave one alive for too long and it quietly ruins your plans from the opposite side of the board.
I wasn’t about to negotiate with that.
Needless to say, the first few ticks were red.
But because I was still delusional, I challenged myself to get a green tick. Preferably before the year is out.
Cue 16 hours later.
After several red ticks and more resets than I care to admit, something unexpected happened.
I solved a Crazy Mode puzzle.
On the first attempt.
A green tick appeared.
I did it.
In under 24 hours.
Looking back, the green tick wasn’t the interesting part.
The interesting part was realising that somewhere between “I have to trace the knight’s L-shaped moves with my finger” and “Experts Only“, my brain had quietly rewired itself.
Apparently that’s how progress works.
It doesn’t arrive with a fanfare.
It arrives disguised as a small green square with a tick.