How Ninjas Chess supports strategic thinking
Proper chess for spatial reasoning, planning and tactical thinking. Choose Dojo Challenge against a computer, a five-puzzle Puzzle Path set, or Classroom Duel on one screen. No clock, account or arithmetic interruptions.
How to play
- Choose your mode, opponent or unlocked dojo, and learning support. Fade as I improve is on by default. Match length varies; a full match can take 10–30 minutes or longer.
- Tap a piece and its destination, or use the large Move from/Move to controls. Focus the board for arrow keys and Enter/Space. Escape cancels selection.
- White moves first. Make your king safe when in check; win with checkmate, not material points. Promotion offers queen, rook, bishop and knight.
- Tools provides Undo, Flip, legal-move help and rules. Puzzle clues progress from an idea to a piece cue to a demonstrated move. Restart restores the same puzzle.
- Light five distinct lanterns in a dojo to open the next. Guided completions count for access, but independent first-attempt evidence is separate.
- The current library contains 96 introductory positions. Recommended sets favour unseen positions; you can choose any unlocked position yourself. Recent retries offer guidance without automatically changing your support.
- Exit opens a pause menu, away from moving controls. Save and exit preserves one resumable match locally if storage is available. Resigning is a separate deliberate action.
- Replay is at the top of results. Optional bounded-engine review is not an accuracy rating; retrying a reviewed position is separate practice, not another match win.
Skills practised
- Piece movement and coordinates
- King safety and legal responses to check
- Forks, pins, discovered attacks and short mating plans
- Comparing plans against an opponent’s reply
Teacher notes
- Chess is a scoped expansion into strategy and spatial reasoning, not a claim of arithmetic fluency. Use paired discussion or a five-puzzle starter; full matches are untimed and resumable.
- Support and opponent difficulty are independent. A slow thoughtful move is not weak reasoning. Legal-move highlights teach movement, not which move is best.
- Ready for a harder challenge needs six independent first attempts among eight distinct new positions across at least two sets. Repeated, corrected, hinted and demonstrated work cannot manufacture mastery.
- Casual draws automatically include stalemate, insufficient material, threefold repetition and the fifty-move condition. This is not full FIDE tournament claim procedure or exhaustive dead-position adjudication.
- Computer rivals are bounded-search game levels, not Elo ratings or perfect-play claims. The board remains usable during searches. A failure preserves the position and offers Retry or two-player continuation.
- Progress, one resumable match and the latest compact result stay on this device and are clearable from Privacy. No pupil identities or completion counters. Open-source notices are at /open-source-credits.
