How to play Capture

How to play in four steps

• Choose a piece. Its normal chess move must reach another piece.
• Capture that piece. Each moving piece may capture at most twice.
• Leave the king until the end. The king can move but can never be captured.
• Keep taking pieces until only the king remains. Use undo when a path gets stuck.

The whole goal: leave one king

Capture is a one-player chess logic puzzle on an eight-by-eight board. You start with a king and several other pieces. Move one piece onto another to remove the target. Keep doing that until the king is the only piece left.

There are no opposing colors. Every piece is yours, and every move must capture. You cannot move to an empty square to improve your position. You also cannot take the king, even when a rook or queen has a clear line to it.

Because the king can never be captured, the final capture is always made by the king. When only the king and one other piece remain, that piece cannot take the king, so the king must take it. Save at least one of the king's two captures for that last step.

Five familiar moves

This game does not use pawns. There is no check, checkmate, castling, en passant, or promotion. A king can stand next to a piece that could otherwise capture along that line: king safety in ordinary chess is not part of this puzzle.

• King: one square in any direction. It can capture up to twice, just like the other pieces, but it must survive.
• Queen: any number of squares along a row, column, or diagonal. Other pieces block its path.
• Rook: any number of squares along a row or column, with no piece in between.
• Bishop: any number of squares along a diagonal, with no piece in between. It always stays on its starting square color.
• Knight: two squares in one direction and one square sideways. It jumps over pieces along the way; only the landing square matters.

Read the two dots

A piece starts with two amber dots. Each capture it makes spends one dot. When both are gray, the piece is spent: it cannot move again. It can still be captured by another piece, so a spent piece is often the next useful target.

The budget belongs to the moving piece. Capturing a piece does not give you its unused moves, and landing on a new square does not reset your counter. A rook that has captured once carries its one remaining capture to the new square. If your king spends both captures while other pieces remain, undo: that path cannot finish.

Tap, then take

Tap or click the piece you want to move. Amber target rings show its legal captures. Choose one of those occupied squares to make the move. Tap your selected piece again to clear the selection, or choose another piece to consider it.

With a keyboard, use Tab to enter the board, the arrow keys to move focus, and Enter or Space to select a piece or target. Square names run a8 to h1. A screen reader announces the piece, square, and remaining captures; the live message confirms each move.

A legal target is not necessarily part of a winning solution. The rings show allowed moves, not a promise that a choice will work. The Hint button asks for a move that still leads to a solution from your current position.

Recover without losing the puzzle

Undo takes back your last capture and restores both pieces and their counters. Reset returns to the original board. Hints point to one viable capture without moving the piece for you. If a legal sequence has left no winning path, the hint message asks you to undo or reset.

The timer begins with your first move or hint. It includes time away from the page once started. Resetting the same board does not erase time already spent or hints already used. A new unlimited puzzle begins a new timer.

Daily, unlimited, and the library

The daily board has seven pieces, so a win needs six captures. It changes at midnight UTC. The archive lets you return to earlier released boards. Unlimited mode has easy five-piece, standard seven-piece, and hard nine-piece boards. The puzzle library has 300 stable seven-piece puzzles. Once the rules feel natural, the Capture strategies guide explains how to plan a full chain.

Your browser saves move history automatically when storage is available. A signed-in player can also save daily progress across devices. The game checks saved moves before showing them. Daily scores require sign-in and a complete server-checked winning path; practice boards do not enter the leaderboard.