Your Daily Puzzle Just Tripled

The old daily was one puzzle — a single mate-in-N, in and out in maybe 30 seconds. Fine, but over too fast to feel like anything.

Now every daily ships as three sub-puzzles in order:

• Mate in 1 — the warm-up. Find the kill in a single move.
• Mate in 2 — set the trap. Two moves to forced mate.
• Mate in 3 — the boss. Three moves of careful pressure.

One shared timer runs across all three. Moves and hints accumulate. You're playing the whole set as one continuous puzzle.

Every completed daily gets a star rating based on how cleanly you solved the whole set:

• 3 stars — perfect. No hints. 6 moves total (the minimum: 3 + 2 + 1).
• 2 stars — clean. At most 1 hint, at most 8 moves. No auto-reveals.
• 1 star — you made it through, but burned moves, hints, or had to give up on a sub-puzzle.
• 0 stars — you abandoned before all three sub-puzzles ended.

Stars show up on the streak card, on every solved day in the 30-day calendar, and on the celebration screen at the end of the daily.

If you can't crack one of the sub-puzzles, the game auto-reveals it and rolls you on to the next one. Your max rating caps at 1 star for the day, but the day still counts toward your streak. You don't have to be perfect to keep it alive.

• Any completion (1+ star) holds your streak.
• Last 30 days are visible on the daily page, with stars rendered on every solved cell.
• Tap any past day to replay it — no streak credit, just for fun.
• Best streak and total solved counts live on the same card.

Each daily triple shares a tactical theme. "Pin Day" is three pin puzzles back-to-back. "Smothered Mate Day" is three smothered mates. There's "Opera Mate", "Pawn Push", "Discovered Check", "Hook Mate" — twenty themed sets in rotation.

All 60 puzzles are hand-picked from the Lichess database, sorted by popularity, and engine-verified before they ship.

One puzzle was too quick to feel like a real workout. Three gives you a ramp — easy → hard — and an ending that rewards efficiency. Stars give returning players a reason to chase a perfect day on top of just keeping a streak alive.

We ran daily triples internally for a couple of weeks and keeping a streak rolling started to feel like the actual game. Shipping it.