Welcome back to another month of puzzling! If you haven’t already seen it, the second book in the Detective Watts series is now available for your reading pleasure (by the way, it properly introduces the character featured in this month’s entry). Check it out if you’re interested; otherwise, let’s get to it!

The next entry is based on Star Battle. Vera Watts, an avid chess player, often cooks up chess-style puzzles for her grandson Marty. One such puzzle involves a chess board divided into regions, much like a medieval kingdom; furthermore, each region is ruled by her favorite chess piece, a knight. Your goal is to place knights on the grid such that the following conditions are met:

• Each region of the grid must contain exactly one knight.
• No two knights may be adjacent horizontally, vertically, or diagonally.

The pictures below depict a sample puzzle on a 5×5 grid, along with its solution. Note that there are five distinct regions on the grid, despite the reused colors for some regions. Tiles of the same color touching diagonally are not part of the same region.

Now, can you solve the puzzle below and help Vera place her knights?

The solution will be released in the next blog post. Also, if you tried the puzzle from the last blog entry, here is its solution below. There is more than one way to connect all the ducks with their pairs, but this is the only way to use every tile on the grid.