Sherzod Khaydarbekov: Chess Puzzles Without a Chessboard

Quick answer: Sherzod Khaydarbekov is a puzzle designer from Tashkent, Uzbekistan who builds mechanical puzzles out of chess. He uses standard chess moves, but on a board cut to fit the problem rather than a chessboard, and sets positions no actual game would ever produce. We carry two of them.

Best for: chess players who want something physical on the desk, and puzzle solvers who are tired of pieces that interlock.

Every other designer in this shop makes puzzles out of geometry. Pieces that notch together, pack into a box, rotate past each other, refuse to come apart. Take the pieces away and there is no puzzle left, because the puzzle is the shape.

Khaydarbekov does something different, and it took me a while to see how different. His puzzles have no mechanism at all.

The Puzzle Is the Rules

Pick up Swapping Castles and nothing happens. The rooks lift off the board. They go back on. There is no catch, no hidden movement, nothing that resists you. Mechanically it is a board and some pieces.

The difficulty is entirely in what you are allowed to do. Four black rooks on one side, four white on the other, and the task is to swap them. Rooks move as rooks: any distance, straight lines, no jumping. You may not capture. The empty squares are the only room you have to work in, and every move you make changes which squares are free for the next one.

That is a genuine puzzle with a genuine solution, and you could in principle solve it on paper. The physical object exists because moving the pieces with your hands is how you think about it.

This is rarer than it sounds. A burr or a packing puzzle is hard because of how solids occupy space. Khaydarbekov's puzzles are hard because of a rule set you already know.

He Cuts the Board to Fit the Problem

This is the part that convinced me he is a serious designer, and it is easy to miss because it looks like packaging.

These are not chessboards. There is no eight by eight. Each one is a small rectangular tray of recessed squares, sized to the problem and no larger, so the pieces sit in wells rather than standing on a surface. Queen's Attack is about four squares across and five deep. That is the entire world the puzzle happens in.

And the titles are not printed on it. QUEEN'S and ATTACK sit on raised panels that take up cells. Those cells are gone. Pieces cannot pass through them, cannot land on them, and have to be routed around them.

So the branding is the obstacle. The thing that would be decoration on anyone else's puzzle is doing structural work here. Cover the panels with your hand and you can see immediately how much easier the puzzle would be without them.

That is the whole format. On a real chessboard neither of these problems is interesting: a pawn walks up an empty file, rooks swap sides in a few moves. Every square the designer declines to give you turns a free move into a negotiation.

Who Is Sherzod Khaydarbekov?

He works from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and chess-based logic is his whole territory rather than an occasional theme. Beyond the two we carry, his designs include Four Pawns and Knight and Rook, built on the same principle: a legal-move problem that looks like a position and never could be one.

He is also, as far as I can tell, uncovered. Searching all nine of the puzzle blogs I read regularly returns nothing for his name. Neither does our largest competitor's library. For a designer with a coherent body of work and a genuinely original idea, that is a strange gap, and part of why this page exists.

Queen's Attack: The Queen Is Missing

Queen's Attack opens with the queen missing. In her place stand four knights, four rooks, four bishops and three pawns, and your job is to capture the black pawns using a single white pawn, without taking any white piece.

The joke in the title takes a second. There is no queen. The board is crowded with the pieces that would normally support her, and the work has to be done by the weakest thing on it. Every capture a pawn makes is diagonal and forward only, which means the route is forced far more than it first appears.

Swapping Castles: Eight Rooks, No Captures

Swapping Castles is the cleaner of the two and the one I would start with. Eight rooks, two sides, swap them without captures.

It belongs to a family of problems mathematicians would recognise as a sorting puzzle under movement constraints, and it has the quality the best of those have: the first few moves are obvious, the middle is where you discover you have trapped yourself, and the fix is usually several moves earlier than where you noticed the problem.

It is also the more portable of the two, which is why it turns up in pocket puzzles for travel.

Do You Need to Play Chess?

No, and the reason is worth being precise about, because it is easy to get backwards.

You need to know how the pieces move. That is roughly five minutes of learning and the rules are printed into the puzzle's goal.

But these are not anti-chess puzzles, and they are not aimed at people who would never sit down for a game. The moves are genuinely chess moves and the constraints are genuinely chess constraints; only the board is custom. Chess players tend to do well at them, because board sense, the habit of seeing which squares are covered and which routes are closed, is exactly the skill being tested. If you enjoy chess, you will enjoy these more, not less.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Sherzod Khaydarbekov?

A puzzle designer from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, who specialises in mechanical puzzles built on chess. His puzzles use a standard board and standard moves to pose problems that could not arise in a real game.

What puzzles has Sherzod Khaydarbekov designed?

We carry Queen's Attack and Swapping Castles. His wider body of work includes Four Pawns and Knight and Rook, all built on the same legal-move principle. The full set we stock is in the Sherzod Khaydarbekov collection.

Do you need to know chess to solve them?

Only how the pieces move, which takes a few minutes to learn. Chess players have an advantage because board sense is the skill being tested, but no opening theory or endgame knowledge is involved.

How hard are his chess puzzles?

Both are rated Medium. They are not punishing, but they do not fall quickly either, and the failure mode is specific: you reach a position where nothing legal helps and have to work out how many moves back the real mistake was.

Are these the same as chess problems in a book?

No. A book problem asks for the best move in a position that could occur in a game. These ask you to reach a target arrangement, from a position that could never occur, using only legal moves. The goal is rearrangement rather than attack.

Which Khaydarbekov Puzzle to Start With

Take Swapping Castles first. It explains itself faster and travels better. The whole shelf is in the Sherzod Khaydarbekov collection, and if you want the puzzles rather than the person, both appear in two chess puzzles you solve with your hands. For the wider category they sit in, try mechanical puzzles.