Knight Moves
Home Up Card Game


Knight Moves!!

Anyone who has ever played Chess knows the Knight is by far the trickiest piece on the board.  The Knight may not be the most powerful piece, but it is one of the deadliest.  Due to the baffling complexity of the Knight's unusual movements, it is often very difficult to predict exactly what this sneaky piece is up to next!!  The Knight is sometimes known as the Assassin for its unique ability to sneak up on you!

This difficult puzzle uses the intricate patterns of the Knight's moves to great effect.

Just to refresh your memory, the Knight always jumps to a square of a different color. If it is sitting on white, it must jump to gray.  It can move two squares in any of four directions plus one square left or right, up or down. 

If my explanation isn't good enough, just study the picture and you should figure it out!!

A standard chess board has 64 squares, but as you will soon see, for our puzzle there are only 36 squares. 


In the puzzle below, the Knight starts in Square 1 (also known as Square A1 on the grid shown further below).

Your job is to track the 37 consecutive moves that take the Knight from A1 all the way around the board and back to A1 on the 37th move. Don't forget the Knight cannot move to the same space twice!! 

As you will see in the diagram below, some of the Knight's moves have been revealed.  For example, the Knight's 5th move was to Square B4 and its 32nd move was to F5.

Can you logically determine the missing numbers for the other squares and can up with the order of all 37 moves?


I found this puzzle to be very challenging.  In some ways it was like solving a maze where you have several choices of moves in some spots.

I never came up with a systematic way to crack this puzzle open although I am sure there is one.  I had no idea how to use a Logic Puzzle Truth Table.

Since I didn't have a good way to solve it, I did it by brute force/trial and error.  Like a rat in a maze, I had to start over a lot of times.  It took my 120-something IQ age-ravished brain a couple hours. (But I will let in on a secret - I had fun!!)  You should do better.  Good luck!


Send your answers to Rick Archer, dance@ssqq.com  There are two ways to send them. First, you can simply send me a picture of your results filling up the box above with the number of each move in each box.

Or you can notate your moves as such:  1 A1, 2 B3 (or C2), 3?, 4?,  5 B4 etc, 6?, 7?, 8 E2... 37 A1.

Hint for the Private Lessons Logic Puzzle:  After filling in all your Truth Chart possibilities, map out a time line for the various clues. You will notice that there are three different strings of consecutive clues. 

Of the three "Strings", one String had only two possible solutions.  The other two strings both had three possible solutions. 

I named the String with only two choices "String A" and "String B".  By comparing these two Master Strings to one of the other two strings (which both seemed to have three possible solutions), I was able to isolate the eventual solution. 

In other words, I matched String A to String Two (C, D, and E) to create sub-Strings AC, AD, and AE).  Then I matched String B to C, D, and E as well to create sub-strings BC, BD, BE.  I came up with only two possible correct answers out of these six possibilities.

Then I compared these two new remaining possibilities to the Third string which also had three possible answers (F, G, and H). This trick eliminated all but one possibility which proved to be the correct answer. This was tedious, but effective.

Back to Private Lessons Logic Puzzle

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