Ronin is a game of sudoku played on a chessboard. The 6×6 chessboard is divided into 3×2 regions, each of which must contain a king, a queen, a rook, a bishop, a knight and a pawn. No piece can attack another piece of the same type, ignoring pieces that are in the way — so you can't have two rooks in the same row or column, two bishops on the same diagonal, etc.
You can have (say) two knights in the same row or column, because knights do not move horizontally or vertically. There is no difference between the white and black pieces except that clues are shown in black and your guesses are shown in white.
I think of the pawns as moving up the screen, but it doesn't matter — no two pawns can be diagonally adjacent because one will always be attacking the other.
In this example, the rook in the left-hand region must be in the highlighted square because the rook in the right-hand region would be attacking it otherwise:
In this example, the highlighted square can only be a knight, because any other piece would be under attack:
You can move around the board with the arrow keys, and insert pieces with K, Q, R, B, N (for kNight) and P. Delete removes pieces and holding shift while pressing the letters adds pencilmarks. Minus and plus will undo and redo moves (as will Z and shift+Z). The first six number keys toggle highlighting, and zero clears highlighting. Shift+zero clears all highlights.
There are only four ways to arrange six queens on a 6×6 chessboard, and they're all rotations and mirrors of the same one.
If you can rule out three of these, you can put all the queens in — sometimes you can do this straight away for some quick progress.
Ronin is © 2024 Andrew Taylor. Font is Montserrat. Chess symbols are from Merida. Icons from Phosphor and FontAwesome Free.
Current streak: 0
Best streak: 0
Next puzzle in 00:00:00
Puzzles complete: 0
Nothing in this menu will count against your streak, it's just to make the puzzle less frustrating.
Are you sure you want to permanently delete all your Ronin data?
Are you sure you want to reveal the solution? This will break your streak.
To transfer your data to another device, open this link on the other device or scan this QR code on the other device.
Pawns attack one space diagonally.
Kings attack one space in any direction.
Rooks attack any number of spaces horizontally or vertically.
Bishops attack any number of spaces diagonally.
Queens attack any number of spaces horizontally, vertically or diagonally.
Knights attack in a L shape, ending up either two spaces horizontally and one vertically, or two vertically and one horizontally, from their original position.