Navigate your bishop to the target square along diagonals. Since the bishop always stays on the same color squares, this exercise strengthens your diagonal visualization and path planning skills.
Pro tip: The bishop moves diagonally and always stays on the same color squares.
Leaderboard
About Bishop Maze
What the bishop maze trains
You are given a bishop, a target square, and a set of blocked squares, and you have to reach the target in as few diagonal moves as possible. The constraint that makes it a real puzzle is colour: a bishop can never leave the colour it starts on, so half the board is simply unreachable and the first thing to check is whether the target is even legal. Once it is, almost every reachable square is two moves away, and the whole skill is finding the intersection square where the two diagonals cross.
That intersection habit is what transfers to real games. Spotting that a bishop on c1 hits h6 via the f4 or e3 crossing is the same calculation as spotting that it can swing to a long diagonal in two tempi, which is how you find retreats, regroupings, and the skewers that come from an unexpected angle. Blocked squares add the second layer: when the natural crossing is occupied you have to search for the alternate one instead of declaring the target unreachable. Pair it with bishop movement for raw diagonal recognition and the diagonals drill to lock in which squares share a line. The knight equivalent, where paths are far less intuitive, is the knight maze.