“Find the Magnus Win” Chess Puzzle Game

I’m a big chess fan, although not too talented [ELO sitting mid 900’s currently], I play for the love of the game, but like all players I would like to improve.

So I hit the puzzles on Chess.com, and really enjoy the challenge… although find it frustrating when the daily low daily limit is reached.

This motivated me to find another option & make my own version of the puzzles 🙂

First I started out by finding games from Magnus, that he’d won by checkmate, late in the game, then for each game I took 2 moves back for each player from CM. The challenge is to find what Magnus moved to win the game.

Each of the games are randomly selected from a pool of ~1k

I wanted still to get better though, and acknowledge that I’m not strong, or consistent with my openings. So building from what I created with the puzzles, and from what Chess.com offer, I added opening tutorials, for both white and black pieces.

I find this interesting and useful, feel free to have a play, let me know how this works for you, and shout out if there’s anything else that I could include to help improve your game.
Play here: Find the Magnus Win!

This project is an interactive web application that presents users with chess puzzles derived from games where World Champion Magnus Carlsen won by checkmate. Users can play through the final winning combination from either the White or Black perspective, depending on which color Magnus was playing in the actual game.

The application fetches recent games from the Lichess.org API, processes them to find suitable puzzles, and displays them on an interactive chessboard.
Features

Interactive Chessboard: Users can drag and drop pieces to solve puzzles.

• Mobile Friendly: Supports both drag-and-drop for desktop and tap-to-move for easier interaction on mobile devices.
• Real Games: All puzzles are from actual games played by Magnus Carlsen (under his Lichess handle “DrNykterstein”).
• Play as Magnus: The board is always oriented so you are playing from Magnus’s perspective.
• Dynamic Puzzle Generation: A Python script fetches the latest games from the Lichess API to create a fresh set of puzzles.
• User Assistance: Includes “Show Clue” and “Make Best Move” buttons to help the user.
• Skip Puzzle: Allows users to move to a new puzzle if they are stuck.