Description:
A major update: Altus now has a full Puzzles mode, plus a visual overhaul across every menu in the game.
NEW: PUZZLES
There's a new Puzzles entry on the main menu with four ways to play. Preset Puzzles gives you 100 hand-verified checkmate puzzles spread across all three boards, from gentle openers on the 8x8 up to the deep end on the 18x18. Your progress saves per puzzle, so you can leave mid-solve and pick it up later, and solved puzzles are marked in the list.
Create a Puzzle lets you build any position piece by piece, then record the solution yourself by playing both sides to checkmate. Your recording becomes the puzzle's answer key, and anything you make shows up under Play Custom Puzzles with 50 save slots. There's also a Sandbox Board, a fully freeform board where you can place anything, anywhere, on any board size, with saving and loading.
A short "Creating a Puzzle" guide is built right into the Puzzles menu, including a note on how recorded solutions work so your custom puzzles play the way you intend.
INTERFACE OVERHAUL
Every screen in the game now carries the full art treatment. Puzzle menus, save and load grids, settings screens, end-of-game cards, and the move picker all match the game's look, with one unified font throughout.
Quitting no longer dumps you to the main menu. Backing out of a match, an AI Challenge, or a puzzle now returns you to the screen you launched from, so when you finish a puzzle you land back at the puzzle list, ready for the next one.
Also in this update: redesigned result cards with clearer actions, screen transitions that fade through the game's key art, and fixes for a missing background on the Game Review controls, and font inconsistencies across menus.
Enjoy the puzzles! The first forty puzzles are gentler than they look. The last twenty-five are not.That's the clean version — same content, zero markup, just headings in caps and plain paragraphs that read the way a person would write them. Paste it straight into the description field. If Steam's editor gives you a bold button, the two section headers ("New: Puzzles" and "Interface Overhaul") are the only spots worth bolding by hand.