May 13, 2026
Queens, chaos, and check drama
Chess puzzle I found in my dad's old book
A 100-year-old chess brain-melter sent commenters from awe to nitpicking chaos
TLDR: A century-old chess puzzle asks players to cover the whole board with four queens and a bishop, and it turns out there are 388 possible answers. Commenters were split between impressed, confused, and gloriously nitpicky over clunky controls, unclear wording, and whether the puzzle even says the right thing.
A dusty old chess puzzle just turned into a full-blown comment-section soap opera. The challenge sounds simple enough: place four queens and one bishop on a chessboard so every single square is under attack, meaning a white king would have nowhere safe to stand. In practice? People wandered in expecting a cute vintage brain teaser and walked out sounding emotionally changed. One player summed up the collective vibe with the perfectly exhausted, “That was an experience.” Honestly, same.
But the real action was in the replies, where the community did what communities do best: immediately start tweaking, correcting, and flexing. One camp was mildly annoyed that the puzzle makes you click “Check” after every move, with a very relatable plea for the site to just do it automatically. Another commenter came in with the biggest show-off reveal of the thread: there are 388 solutions, and many of them look totally wrong at first glance. That sparked the classic puzzle-lover drama of intuition vs reality, as neat-looking patterns got humbled by weird, ugly answers that still work.
Then came the rule-lawyer showdown. One commenter pounced on the wording, arguing it should say “check,” not “checkmate,” because a king can attack an unprotected queen. Another spotted what felt like a scandalous twist: the so-called dark-squared bishop appears on a white square in the solution, prompting a cheerful “XD” and accusations that the instructions are murky. So yes, this old puzzle didn’t just test chess skill—it unleashed the internet’s favorite endgame: pedantry, confusion, and competitive suffering.
Key Points
- •The article attributes the chess puzzle to Kempelen, linked with the “Mechanical Chess Player.”
- •It describes the puzzle as one of the most difficult among the problems associated with him.
- •The challenge requires placing four black queens and one black bishop on a chessboard.
- •The arrangement must ensure that every square on the board is under attack by the black pieces.
- •Under the required arrangement, there must be no square where a white king can be placed without being in check.