The new puzzle system has been live for almost a month now and we wanted to take stock with a quick analysis, as well as introduce a new feature!

Puzzle Dashboard

On the new Puzzle Dashboard you can see your strengths and weaknesses, as well as a review of your recently played puzzles. Performance and solve percentages are available, as well as an option to replay failed puzzles. You can also dig into your specific strengths and weaknesses, and retry failed puzzles by theme!

Puzzle Dashboard

How it's going:

In total, we've now generated over a million puzzles, and we're not done yet - with more of our database left to mine for additional puzzles! If you want to use the database for any personal or commercial project it's all freely available here.

Histogram plot of the puzzle database by rating

There's a large spike at 1500 rating because we still have new puzzles trickling in that have not been played yet, and likewise the spikes to the left of centre are (probably) from puzzles that have not yet fully settled into their ratings after being played a small number of times. We think there's no equivalent pattern on the right because generally more solvers are in the >1500 category so those puzzles get played quicker but let us know in the forum if you have an alternative explanation!

Here are some of the most challenging themes by average puzzle rating:

And here are the lowest rated themes on average:

You might be unsurprised to learn that mate in 1 is also the most popular category to train exclusively, followed by opening puzzles, mate in 2 puzzles, and endgames - although all themes together make up only 5% of puzzle solves, with most people selecting the "healthy mix". Another caveat of course that it's much quicker to solve a mate in 1 so solvers can get through them more quickly!

Puzzles are also being well tagged, with 12x more upvotes on motifs than downvotes, so thank you for helping to build a robust puzzle set.

We hope you're enjoying the new puzzles as much as we are. Happy training!