Knight's gauntlet

What it trains

Seeing an enemy's reach without working it out, on the piece everyone mis-sees. The plain knight's journey teaches the geometry; the gauntlet makes you walk it across a defended board, which is how it turns up in a game. This is the classic knight-versus-queen walk trainers have assigned for decades, levelled.

How to use it

Click the knight's path square by square. The walk has to be the shortest safe one: landing on a square an enemy attacks, on an enemy itself, or taking any detour is refused on the spot and counts as a miss. The enemies never move and cannot be captured; they block each other's lines, and your knight never shields a square for itself, because landing somewhere means having left somewhere.

The first level paints every guarded square, so the maze teaches its own shape. From the second level the dots are gone and the queen's reach has to be seen before every hop, which is the drill. Five walks per run, and a walk only scores when it is clean.

The other drills