The Arcade Is Training in Disguise

There is a slightly sniffy view that chess-themed arcade games are a distraction from chess. We built ours from the actual engine geometry precisely to avoid that — every movement rule, every capture, every legal square comes from the same code that runs a real game. What you practise there is real.

Pawn Storm

A wave of pieces advancing at you, and a set of legal moves to answer with. Stripped of everything else, it is a drill in threat recognition: which of the things coming towards you can actually reach you, and in how many moves.

That question — what does this piece touch, right now, and what will it touch next move — is the single most common calculation in a real game. Playing it at speed, dozens of times a minute, turns a deliberate check into an instinct.

Knight Runner

A knight moving continuously through a board that keeps changing. It trains the thing described in an earlier edition of this journal: the awkward shape of two knight moves, felt rather than calculated.

Players who spend a week on it report the same thing, which is that knight forks start appearing in their games unbidden. Not because they learned about forks — they already knew about forks — but because the geometry became fast enough to notice mid-game.

Attack Radar and Check Sniper

The two most nakedly educational things we have built. Radar puts one piece on a board and asks you to mark every square it touches, which is board vision with the training wheels removed. Sniper gives you a position and asks only for the move that gives check — the forcing move first, always, which is the calculation habit every trainer tries to instil and almost nobody enjoys practising directly.

Ten minutes, and then go play

None of this replaces games. Arcade drills sharpen the mechanical layer underneath your chess so your actual thinking has room to work on plans instead of on where the knight goes.

Ten minutes before a session. Then close it and play something with a real opponent.