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Sixty seconds, one mating move per position. Three misses and you are out. How many can you find?
White is to move and there is exactly one move that delivers checkmate. Tap one of your pieces to pick it up — every square it can legally reach lights up — then tap the square you want.
Find the mate and the position is replaced immediately. Play any other legal move and the board shakes, the move is taken back and you lose one of your three chances.
Positions get more crowded as you go: a lone queen at first, then rooks, then several pieces at once, so there are more moves to sift through each time.
The clock runs for sixty seconds from your first tap. It ends there, or on your third miss — whichever comes first. Your score is the number solved.
Look at the enemy king before you look at your own pieces. Count its escape squares — the empty ones it could run to, and the ones its own pawns are already blocking. A king with two flight squares needs a move that covers both while giving check, and there are usually very few candidates that do that. A king with none only needs to be checked by something it cannot capture or block.
Checks first, always. Mate is a check, so every move that is not a check can be ignored entirely. On a crowded board that cuts thirty candidate moves down to four or five in a couple of seconds, and it is the single habit that separates a fast solver from a slow one.
Watch for the piece that is already doing work. In most of these positions one piece — usually the king or a distant rook — is covering escape squares from far away and does not move at all. The mating move is nearly always played by the other piece, arriving at a square the quiet piece already defends. If you cannot find the mate, ask which squares your quiet piece guards, and look for a check that lands on one of them.
Do not brute-force. Three misses ends the run, so tapping through every legal move is not a strategy here — it will cost you the game before the clock does. When a position resists, it is faster to re-count the king's escape squares than to keep trying moves; nearly every miss comes from forgetting one flight square.