About Chess Puzzle Vault

Chess Puzzle Vault is a free, open chess puzzle training platform. We believe every player — from absolute beginners to titled competitors — deserves access to high-quality tactical training without a paywall, without clutter, and without gimmicks.

Why we built this

Tactical vision is the single fastest way to improve at chess, but most players train it inefficiently: solving random puzzles with no structure, no sense of difficulty, and no feedback loop. We built Chess Puzzle Vault to fix that. Every puzzle is tagged by theme and calibrated with an Elo-based difficulty rating, so the system can always hand you something just outside your comfort zone — hard enough to teach you something, not so hard that it feels unfair.

How training works here

Each puzzle you solve adjusts your personal rating up or down, the same way a real chess rating works. Miss a tactic and it comes back to you later through spaced repetition, timed for roughly the point you'd otherwise start to forget it. Over time this builds a training queue that's tailored entirely to your weaknesses instead of a generic puzzle feed.

What's included

• Thousands of puzzles — filterable by theme, opening, difficulty, and rating range.
• Adaptive rating — an Elo-style rating that updates with every puzzle you attempt.
• Spaced repetition — puzzles you struggle with resurface automatically at the right interval.
• Daily puzzle — one curated challenge every day, the same for everyone, great for warming up.
• Engine analysis — every position can be checked against Stockfish so you understand not just the right move, but why.
• Achievements & leaderboard — badges for milestones and streaks, and a global leaderboard if you like to compete.
• Light & dark themes, multiple board and piece styles, and a distraction-free solving screen.

Our approach

The interface is deliberately calm. The board is always the main event — everything else exists to support learning, not compete for your attention. We keep the platform fast and lightweight on purpose: no bloated trackers, no autoplaying media, nothing that gets between you and the next puzzle. Advertising, where shown, is limited to clearly-marked, non-intrusive placements that never interrupt an active puzzle.

Who it's for

Whether you're a beginner learning to spot a fork for the first time, a club player grinding toward your next rating milestone, or a coach looking for themed puzzle sets for your students, Chess Puzzle Vault is built to scale with you. There is no premium tier that gates puzzles behind a paywall — the core training experience is, and will stay, free.

Get in touch

Questions, feedback, a bug you've spotted, or a puzzle that seems wrong? Visit our contact page — we read every message.