Welcome To The New Chess Puzzles Experience!
At last! Today we finished rolling out a brand new version of our beloved Tactics Trainer, which will now be known simply as Puzzles! This vital training tool is everything it used to be—but it's now deeper, more interactive and emphasizes three powerful ways to train. Let's take a look:
When you land on Puzzles, the first thing you'll see is a new mode selector over the board:
.
This is your hub for all Puzzle-based training features—including Puzzle Rush! (But hey, you already know about Puzzle Rush; let's move on...)
Rated Mode
Rated Puzzles should be pretty familiar by now, but we've made some huge improvements to the look, feel and general interactivity here—in part by borrowing a couple of ideas from the new Lessons feature. At the start, you'll see a visual digest of career stats to the right of the board.
Once you get solving, you'll see animated feedback on the board for correct and incorrect moves, just like in Lessons. Maybe even cooler is the new graph that shows rating progress for your current training session, relative to your rating when you started.
.
So much nicer than a row of ❌ and ✔! And as before (but now with more detail), you can hover on any node to see information about the puzzle itself.
Learning Mode
This new mode of Puzzles builds on what used to be some (rather well-hidden) Tactics Trainer settings and spins them into a powerful new training mode of its own. No ratings, time pressure, or stress here: Just tell the server what kind of tactical themes you want to hone and begin!
This is completely customizable training, allowing you to select one or more specific themes to train on, then define the difficulty range of your puzzles by their rating, and even focus exclusively on puzzles that tricked you in the past.
.
Not sure where to focus? Well, if you've already done some Rated training, you'll see your average scores for each theme, with your lowest average scores near the top. Now you know what to work on. In that way, Rated mode and Learning mode are excellent complementary activities to improve your tactical vision. And you know what that means...higher scores in Puzzle Rush! 
Even though you aren't getting rated for your performance in Learning mode, you can see how you're doing as you progress: Score 1-3 crowns for each attempt, based on how many tries needed to get the solution, and see your current streak of correct solutions. (Also note that as you train, you can see at the top how many and which themes you've selected for the current session.)
Learning is fun!
Rush Mode
Introduced in November 2018, Puzzle Rush went viral quickly. Everyone is playing it, from beginners to super-grandmasters.
We are planning to bring new great features to Puzzle Rush soon. For now, if you haven't given it a try yet, here are the rules:
- Solve as many puzzles as you can in five minutes.
- Each puzzle gets harder as you go.
- Three strikes and you’re out.
For more information about Puzzle Rush, see our article here.
Finally, because we now think of Puzzles as multiple (related) features, we have divided them up in terms of membership benefits. Here's how it breaks down:
Basic: 5 Rated Puzzles + 5 Learning Puzzles + 1 Puzzle Rush
Gold: 25 Rated Puzzles + 25 Learning Puzzles + 5 Puzzle Rushes
Platinum/Diamond: Unlimited
Thanks for reading, and please let us know what you think in the comments.
