About AFCL Puzzles
Rated tactical training for the Africa Chess League.
Every puzzle is a position from a real game with one best move to find. Puzzles are timed and rated, and your record is kept against your AFCL account — the same account you use for the league, the clubs and the ladders.
Your puzzle rating
Ratings start at 1200 and use a Glicko-style calculation: alongside the rating the platform keeps a measure of how certain it is, so early attempts move you a long way and later ones move you less.
Three things decide the change after a rated puzzle.
- The puzzle’s rating. Beating one above yours gains more than beating one below. A puzzle’s own rating never moves, so it is worth the same to everyone who meets it.
- Wrong moves. A puzzle is worth
1 ÷ (1 + wrong moves)of a win — full credit clean, half after one mistake, a third after two. Giving up or revealing the answer scores nothing. - Time. Beating the expected time counts as beating a harder puzzle, up to 60 rating points; taking longer counts as an easier one, by the same margin. Time is only applied to puzzles you solve.
The expected time — par — is twelve seconds per move to find, doubling for every 600 rating points above 1500. A 1500 one-mover is twelve seconds; a 2100 one-mover is twenty-four; a 1500 three-mover is thirty-six. Solving in exactly par leaves the time factor at zero.
Only your first attempt at a puzzle is rated. Meeting one again is a replay: it appears in your history marked as such and does not move your rating.
Accuracy
The share of the moves you played that were the move. A four-move puzzle solved with one wrong try is 80%; a one-mover failed twice is 0%. Revealing the answer contributes the wrong moves and no correct ones.
The puzzle of the day
One puzzle, the same for everyone, changing at midnight UTC. Its leaderboard counts clean solves only — first time, no answer shown.
Rankings
One leaderboard, ordered by puzzle rating, listing everyone who has solved at least one rated puzzle. Ratings start at 1200, so a first solve places somebody in the middle of the table rather than at the top of it.
The league
AFCL Puzzles is part of the Africa Chess League, a continental club championship. Standings, clubs, matchdays and players are on the main site.