Boost Your Skills with Bodyguard Puzzles!

Bodyguarding your chess pieces isn't just a move – it's a game-changer. Bodyguard puzzles teach you the art of strategic protection, interlocking your pieces to ensure any potential captures can be swiftly countered.

Chess board set up to demonstrate bodyguarding

What are Bodyguard Puzzles?

Bodyguard puzzles are an entirely new type of challenge, unique to The Queen’s Gambit Chess!

In these puzzles, there are only your pieces and you can move any of them. The aim is to protect all of the pieces on the board with each other, meaning that if any of them were captured, you would immediately be able to take the capturing piece.

How to play

If you want to earn 3 stars on a Bodyguard puzzle, you’ll have to secure your pieces in the minimum amount of moves.

Let’s take a look at an example:

In this first puzzle, most pieces are already protected, however, the back two pawns are left exposed. We will need to find which piece to move to ensure that they are all protected, without leaving any of our existing pieces vulnerable. 

The opening position of the bodyguard puzzle, showing four chess pawns and two rooks on a chalk board chess grid. Two of the pawns are unprotected.

We can try moving our rooks out to protect the pawns like this, but now our rooks aren’t protected.

An animated version of the bodyguard puzzle, showing hows the movement of two rooks, one two spaces to its left (Rb3), one two spaces to its right (Rf1). This protects some initially un-guarded pawns, but the rooks are now un-guarded.

Fortunately, this is easily solved by bringing the back rook forward so that they can protect each other.

An animated version of the bodyguard puzzle, a rook move forward two spaces (Rf3), all pieces on the board are now protected by another piece.

This is one solution, although, with 3 moves, we were only able to earn 2 stars, so there must be a better solution!

Let’s take another look at the board.

The opening position of the bodyguard puzzle, showing four chess pawns and two rooks on a chalk board chess grid. Two of the pawns are unprotected.

Our rooks protect each other as long as one is in front of the other. The front pawns are protected already, so we don’t need to worry about those. So if we move our front rook forward to protect the back row of pawns (Rd5), we can secure all of our pieces in a single move!

An animated version of the bodyguard puzzle, showing a rook move forward two spaces (Rd5), all pieces on the board are now protected by another piece.

There we have it, one move and three stars in the bag!

Bodyguards are a great way to learn how to build a secure board state without leaving any of your pieces vulnerable, a fundamental skill in becoming a chess master!

Have you been playing through Beth’s Journey and taking on these challenging bodyguard puzzles? Let us know how you’ve tackled them on Twitter.