Frequently Asked Questions

Place chess pieces on the board so their combined coverage lights every target square. Each piece lights the squares it controls (its real chess attack pattern) plus the square it sits on. When every target glows, the level is solved. There is nothing else to it, and that one rule carries all 264 levels. See How to Play for the full breakdown.

Every piece lights the square it sits on, not just the squares it attacks. It is the core rule of the game. A rook on the center of a row lights that whole row, that whole column, and its own square. A piece dropped directly on a target will always light that target, even if its attack lines reach nothing else.

Two ways. Drag a piece from the tray onto the board, with a live preview showing exactly which squares it will light so you can line it up before you let go. Or tap to place: tap a piece in the tray to pick it up, tap a square to preview it there, and tap again to drop it (a "Tap again to place" nudge shows while the square is armed). Tap to place works the same in the campaign, the Daily, and Clocks. On a phone the dragged piece floats a little above your fingertip so your thumb never covers it. If you would rather place in a single tap, you can turn the confirm step off in Settings.

It is a chess principle: you commit to a placement the way you would commit to a move over a real board. There is no undo. If the position is not working, tap Restart to clear the board and try a different approach. The drag preview means you are never guessing blind. (Some early School levels let you simply drag a piece back to the tray while you are still learning, with no penalty.)

No. Restart only clears the pieces on the current board. Your completion record for that level is kept. The campaign has no lives and no energy meter, so you can restart as many times as you like.

A nudge, not the answer. When you use a hint, the game runs a solver, finds a full winning sequence, and shows you the first move of it. You still place the rest yourself. You start with a few free hints and earn more by solving the daily puzzle and finishing worlds; watching an optional rewarded video is another way to top up.

Within a world, levels unlock one at a time as you solve them. If a particular level has you stuck, you can Skip it and move on, and it will not block the rest. Worlds themselves unlock in order: finish every level in a world to open the next one.

Yes, any solved level can be replayed. Your record keeps the fewest moves you have ever used on it, so a sloppier replay never downgrades your best.

A challenge toggle in Settings. With Hard mode on, the light beams stay hidden while you place your pieces, so you solve by calculation instead of watching the board light up as you go. The reveal only happens once you have lit every target. It is off by default, always available with no unlocking, and there are badges for solving puzzles in it.

School teaches the six pieces and the core rule. After that each world bends one rule: Lava adds blocked cells, Ice adds frozen targets that need two pieces, Storm adds enemies, Cosmos adds portals, Beach adds beam reflection, and Night turns the piece in your hand into a flashlight. Forest bends the board shape itself, and Tech, Aqua, and Burger mix the ideas and push the difficulty.

Obstacles introduced in Lava. You cannot place a piece on them, and they stop the sliding beams of a rook, bishop, or queen before they reach the other side. The blocker itself never lights up. A knight jumps over them.

In Ice, frozen targets need two different pieces covering them at the same time. A single piece that attacks the target on two lines still only counts once, so you genuinely need a second, distinct piece. The pips beneath a frozen target show how many pieces currently cover it.

Cells carved out of the grid entirely: they are not part of the board, you cannot place on them, and sliding beams stop at their edge like a board edge. A handful of boards from Lava onward use them. Forest's twist is different: whole boards that are rectangles instead of squares, which quietly changes every piece's reach.

In Storm, enemies sit on fixed squares. Their bodies block your beams like obstacles, and the squares they attack become red no-go zones where you cannot place your pieces. You have to find the gaps in their coverage and work around them.

In Cosmos, portals come in linked pairs. A beam that enters one portal shoots out of its twin still traveling the same direction, which lets you bend a line around the board to reach targets no straight shot could. The pair is symmetric (enter either end), you cannot place a piece on a portal square, and a beam that would loop forever is stopped.

In Beach, diagonal beams bounce off the board edges once, like a billiard bank shot. Only diagonals reflect, so this affects bishops and the diagonal lines of a queen. Straight rook lines are unaffected.

In Night the board lights go out: the tiles and the moons you need to light wait in the dark. The piece you are holding is the flashlight. A pool of light follows it, and moons fade into view wherever it passes. Your placed pieces stay visible, but no beams show yet. When every piece is down you submit, the beams fire, and the whole board lights at once to show what you covered.

11 worlds and 264 campaign levels, plus a daily puzzle and three Clocks modes built from generated puzzles. The Worlds page breaks down every world.

One puzzle a day, the same one for every player worldwide. It ramps across the week: Monday is the gentlest and Sunday is the hardest. Solve it to earn a hint and extend your daily streak, and share a spoiler-free card that shows the date and your streak but never the solution. Miss a day and the streak resets.

Speed challenges built from randomly generated puzzles. 3 Min and 5 Min give you that long to solve as many as you can; Survival drops the clock but ends after three wrong submissions. All three modes get harder as you go and keep your personal best. You can run them with the standard Mixed preset or your own Custom setup.

A practice setup for Clocks runs. Open the Custom configurator to choose exactly which of the six pieces you want to drill, or roll the die to pick a random set for you. The difficulty tier you pick (Easy, Medium, Hard, or Extreme) sets the board size, from 5x5 up to 12x12, and a live preview shows a sample board as you tweak it. Custom runs are unranked, so they never affect your personal bests. There are badges for rolling the die, drilling a single piece, mixing all six, and finishing an Extreme run.

The main 264-level journey across 11 worlds. There is no timer and no pressure, you just solve a board whenever you like. Worlds unlock in sequence as you clear them, and finishing a whole world earns you a hint and a short cutscene.

On your device, and backed up to an anonymous cloud save. Level completions, daily streaks, hint balance, stats, and badges sync to a randomly generated account that is not tied to your name or email, so your progress survives a new phone or a reinstall. Settings stay on the device, and you can delete the cloud copy any time in Settings. There is no account to create.

Your progress comes back. Reinstall the app and the anonymous cloud save restores your completions, streaks, stats, and badges. Purchases are restored through Google Play.

Nothing to create or type. The app signs in to an anonymous, randomly generated account behind the scenes so cloud save works, and it never asks for your name, email, or phone number. See the Privacy Policy for exactly what is and is not collected.

Quietly, in the background: puzzles solved, clean first-try solves, your fastest solve, best flawless streak, restarts, fails, skips, hints used, and a few playful ones like times you blocked your own piece. These power the badges and survive a progress reset.

Every badge is visible from the start with exactly how to earn it, so there are no hidden mystery badges. The badges screen shows your live progress toward the ones with counters, like 7 of 11 worlds, and each one unlocks the moment you earn it. None require spending money. The full set is on the badges page.

Yes, in Settings. A reset clears level completions, world unlocks, your daily streak, and Clocks bests. Your lifetime stats, earned badges, hint balance, and purchases are kept. The reset is permanent.

The app uses Firebase Crashlytics for crash reports and Firebase Analytics for anonymous usage stats, like which levels are popular. No personal information is collected, and I never see your name, email, or location. Full details are in the Privacy Policy.

Yes. Settings lets you lock to Portrait or Landscape, or leave it on Auto to rotate with your phone.

Yes. Turn on Reduced Motion in Settings to cut the animations and transitions, which helps if motion bothers you.

Yes. Settings has independent toggles for sound and for haptics (vibration). Both are on by default.

Not currently. The game is dark by design, with each world tinted in its own colors. A rook is always the white Cburnett piece on a darkened board.

Yes, CoreSquares is free to play. It is freemium: you can work through the worlds and earn hints without spending anything, and if you want a bigger supply you can buy a hint pack. Paid world unlocks are coming soon.

The only ads are optional rewarded videos. You can choose to watch one to earn a free hint, and nothing forces an ad on you in the middle of a puzzle.

Right now, hint packs, through Google Play. Paid world unlocks are on the way. Anything you buy can be restored through Google Play if you reinstall.