5x5 Chess
Minichess on a 5x5 board against an engine with three difficulty levels.
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5×5 Chess
Every piece, five files, no room to hide. Pawns step one square at a time, there is no castling and no en passant — the rest is chess.
Engine strength
Play as
How to Play
- 1Choose an engine strength — Novice, Club or Master — and the colour you want to play
- 2Click one of your pieces to see every square it can legally move to
- 3Click a highlighted square to move; a ring around a piece means you can capture it
- 4Pawns move one square forward and capture diagonally, promoting on the far rank
- 5Deliver checkmate to win — stalemate, repetition and bare kings are draws
Cognitive Skills This Game Trains
Working Memory
The ability to hold and manipulate information in your mind over short periods. Trained through tasks that require maintaining and updating mental representations.
About This Game
Five by five chess strips the game back to its skeleton. With only twenty-five squares there is no slow build-up and no safe corner to castle into: the queens can touch by move three, a single loose pawn decides the endgame, and every exchange changes the evaluation. That makes it an unusually fast way to practise the calculation chess is built on. The engine behind the board is a real search — the three difficulty levels are the same algorithm given different depth budgets, so beating Master genuinely means out-calculating it rather than waiting for a scripted mistake.
The Science Behind It
Chess calculation loads visuospatial working memory and the executive control network at the same time: you have to hold a hypothetical board in mind while evaluating branches against it. Research on chess expertise points to pattern chunking in the fusiform and parietal regions as the mechanism experts use to hold more of the board at once, and the reduced 5x5 board keeps the branching factor low enough that beginners can practise that same look-ahead process without their memory span being the bottleneck.
Difficulty rating
Hard
Intense challenge for experienced players. Demands peak cognitive performance.
Frequently Asked Questions
How is 5x5 chess different from normal chess?
The board is five files by five ranks and each side has one rook, knight, bishop, queen, king and five pawns. Pawns only step one square, so there is no double opening move and no en passant, and there is no castling. Everything else follows standard chess rules, including check, checkmate, stalemate and promotion.
What are the three difficulty levels?
Novice searches a single move ahead and regularly leaves pieces hanging. Club searches three plies and resolves capture trades, so it punishes loose material. Master runs a deep search with capture resolution and plays every move it believes is best.
Can I play as Black?
Yes. Pick your colour on the start screen and the board flips so your pieces sit at the bottom.
Why is Take Back gated behind a memory check?
You get one free takeback per game. After that you have to pass the short-term memory challenge used across the site, which keeps takebacks from turning the game into trial and error.
