How to Create Printable Chess Puzzle Worksheets (Free, in Minutes)

If you teach chess — in a club, a classroom, or one-on-one — you have run into this problem: your students need paper. Screens are great for solving puzzles, but for homework, tournament prep, or a quiet 15 minutes at the start of a lesson, nothing beats a printed sheet of diagrams they can mark up with a pencil.

The trouble is that making that sheet yourself is tedious. You either fight with a word processor and chess-font plugins, or you screenshot positions from a database and paste them into a slide deck that looks unprofessional. This guide walks through a faster path.

1. Decide where your positions come from

You generally have three sources for chess puzzles:

• Your own games (or your students' games) — great for personalised lessons, since the tactics are relevant to their own mistakes.
• A public puzzle database, like the one Lichess maintains — millions of positions tagged by theme (fork, pin, mate in 2, endgame, …) and difficulty.
• Positions you set up yourself for a specific idea you want to drill.

A good worksheet tool should support all three without forcing you to pick one workflow. PuzzlePrint, for example, lets you upload a PGN file of real games, search the Lichess puzzle database by theme and rating, or place pieces on a board manually — and mix all three in a single worksheet.

2. Pick a layout that matches how you'll use it

Layout matters more than people expect. A few rules of thumb:

• 6 diagrams per page works well for homework — enough tasks to be worthwhile, still large enough to read comfortably.
• 4 diagrams per page is better for younger kids or beginners, where a bigger board reduces misreading of squares.
• A single, large diagram per page suits an opening lesson or a "puzzle of the day" printout pinned to a board.

3. Choose a board style your students will recognise

Colour boards are friendly and immediately readable, especially for kids. Classic black-and-white diagrams — the kind you see in printed chess books — look more serious and are the standard for advanced material or club handouts. If you're printing in bulk, black-and-white also saves toner.

4. Always include a solution sheet

Separate the puzzles from the answers. A solution sheet with move numbers and short variations lets students self-check without you writing anything by hand, and it lets you reuse the same worksheet across multiple groups.

5. Generate the PDF and print

Once you've picked positions, layout, and style, the last step should take seconds, not minutes. A properly built worksheet tool renders diagrams as vector graphics (not screenshots), so the PDF stays sharp at any print size — A4, letter, or a projector.

Try it yourself

PuzzlePrint does exactly this: search 50,000+ Lichess puzzles by theme and difficulty, upload your own PGN games, or set up custom positions — then export a print-ready worksheet and solution sheet as PDF. No account needed for the free tier.