Chess Mazes for Kids

 

 

Chess Mazes will help kids learn how to plan their actions many moves in advance, to conduct highly complicated maneuvering with their chess pieces, to transfer the chess pieces safely from certain squares to other more convenient points on the chess board.

Does a chess player really need that expertise? Well, in the course of any chess game players have to perform such operations many times. And very often the success of the whole encounter hinges on the accuracy and swiftness of these actions. Chess Mazes does more than train chess playing skill. It is also meant to develop – little by little, without your kids even noticing it as they play – their intellectual faculties: combinatory thinking, operative memory, ability to focus their attention and make decisions under time pressure.

Chess Mazes – Rules

By its nature the game resembles a maze through which the best way out has to be found as quickly as possible. Now here is the really fun part – the maze is not presented graphically, its “air-castle” walls are being shaped by squares guarded by enemy pieces. Your task is to transfer your single piece from the square it occupies in the initial position to a target square designated by a special symbol. The trick is you have to do it without getting assailed by pieces of the other side !

You choose the color of your piece and the opponent’s pieces. Making moves on the board is also up to you alone. The opposing pieces just stand there motionlessly waiting for their moment to come…when your piece carelessly steps on a square aimed at it by a piece of the opponent, the opponent will immediately capture it, and that will mean you have lost.

The object of the game is for you to reach the desired square within the allotted time and in no more than 70 moves, then victory is yours.

There may be several solutions to a task, i.e. several routes leading to the target square through the maze. In order to win you only need to demonstrate any one of them. However, the number of points you get for your victory (when you lose you score no points) will depend on how close the route you have proposed is to the optimum one: if you have discovered the shortest route you get the most points.

Game Example

Find a shortest route in this position:

The task is to move the White Queen from b2 to f7 for a shortest number of moves and without been captured by Black pieces. All calculations should be done in mind.

Here is the right solution:

This example was taken from the 2nd level of difficulty. You can also see and try to solve some other puzzles, of more complicated levels, generated by the Chess Mazes in this article “Chess Mazes Puzzles: Find a Solution!”

Chess Mazes – Features

The game has two modes: Play and Training. Play mode has 7 levels of difficulty. The difficulty of a particular task is determined by the number of enemy pieces and the time interval in which you must cope with the task. The more pieces are on the board, the more complicated is the maze. All playing tasks are newly generated by the program, their number being virtually unlimited and the possibility of encountering the same situation twice practically equaling zero. For each task you have coped with the program gives you a certain number of points. The higher the difficulty level, the more points you get.

Chess for kids is a great idea – have fun with chess mazes!

System Requirements:
PC: Windows 95/98/2000/ME/XP/Vista