What Pocket Mate is
Pocket Mate is chess on a 4×4 board. You have no king. What you have instead is a pocket — a queen, rook, bishop or knight, or several of them — and on every turn you may either move a piece already on the board or drop a piece from your pocket onto any empty square.
Dropping is the whole idea. It comes from crazyhouse and from tsume shogi, the Japanese mate problems where pieces in hand are part of the solution. Here it turns a tiny board into something that is not really chess anymore: you are not fighting for space, you are threading new pieces into a position until the black king runs out of squares.
Black has a king, usually one other piece, and plays the best defence it can find. Your job is to force checkmate. That is the entire objective — there is no material to win and no endgame to grind out.
The rules, exactly
- White has no king. You cannot be checkmated, so black's only goal is to survive and to eat your pieces.
- Your pocket holds Q, R, B and N. There are no pawns, so no promotion, no en passant and no castling.
- Black starts with a king and at most one knight, bishop or rook. Black may never leave its own king in check.
- Captured pieces are gone. Unlike crazyhouse, nobody gets pieces back. Every trade costs you material you cannot replace.
- Stalemate is a miss. Leaving black with no legal move and no check counts as a failure, not a draw.
- Running out of material is a miss. If black captures everything you have and your pocket is empty, the puzzle ends as "No pieces left".
- There is a move limit: par + 3 of your moves. Exceed it and the puzzle ends as "The king escaped" — even if you were still winning.
What "par" means
Every puzzle has a par: the number of your moves in the shortest forced mate that the puzzle generator could find. A par-4 puzzle is a mate in four of your moves. The move limit is par plus three, which is generous on purpose — it means the puzzle is testing whether you can find the idea, not whether you can count.
Puzzles are generated under strict conditions, and knowing them tells you a lot about how to look at the board:
- The shortest forced mate must equal par exactly.
- Removing any single pocket piece must destroy the mate. That is why every piece in your pocket has a job.
- Exactly one first move forces mate within par. There is a key move, and it is unique.
- Black's defence is chosen to be as stubborn as possible, and among equally long defences it prefers the one that forces you to use every pocket piece.
How to actually solve one
- Count your pocket first. The number of pieces in hand is a strong hint at the length of the solution. Four pieces usually means four moves, and each of them will be needed.
- Look for the key first move. Since the first move is unique, most candidate moves can be eliminated quickly. A move that does not give check or threaten an immediate mate is rarely the key.
- Think in forcing moves. Checks and mate threats leave black almost no choice. On a board this small, a quiet move is usually a wasted move.
- Watch black's captures. A piece dropped onto a square black can simply take is usually a tempo thrown away, unless the capture walks the king into a mating net.
- Use the hint when you are stuck. You get one hint per puzzle. While you are still on the shortest path, it highlights the piece you should play next; if you have already wandered off the path, it says so and does not charge you for it.
- Remember the move limit is not your target. Solving in par is the goal; solving in par plus two is a win that feels like a loss. The end screen shows both your move count and par.
Reading the result
Pocket Mate writes the solution in standard algebraic notation, with one addition: @ means a drop. So N@c3 is "drop a knight on c3", Rxc3 is a capture, + means check and # means checkmate. The share text replaces the moves with squares: 🟨 marks the key first move, ⬜ marks your other moves, 👑 is the mate, and ❌ is the move you lost on.
The daily puzzle
One puzzle per UTC day, the same for everyone. Weekdays are par-4, weekends are par-5, so the weekend puzzle is a longer, harder version of the same idea. Daily #1 was 13 October 2026.
- Your first finish of the day is your official result. Later attempts are practice and do not overwrite it. A daily solved with the hint is marked "· hint" in the result.
- The end screen shows Today's best — the strongest finish by anyone that day, with no name attached.
- Your streak counts consecutive days you finished the daily, and it lives in your browser.
Endless, difficulty and the tutorial
Endless serves puzzles in increasing difficulty: levels 1 to 3 are par 3, levels 4 to 7 are par 4, and level 8 onward is par 5. Three misses end the run, and your score is the number of puzzles you solved.
Black can think at two strengths. Club is the default and searches a fixed number of positions per reply, so a slow device waits a little longer rather than getting a weaker opponent. Grandmaster searches without that position limit but stops after 1.5 seconds; its replies can differ between a fast and a slow device, and results using it are labelled "· grandmaster" so they are not confused with the standard game.
The first time you open a daily or an endless run, a short tutorial plays: a scripted demo showing a rook moving, the king running, a rook being dropped, and mate — then a par-2 puzzle to try for yourself. You can replay it any time with the question-mark button.
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