Knight Move is a 1990 Japan-exclusive puzzle game for the Famicom Disk System, published by Nintendo and designed by Alexey Pajitnov — the creator of Tetris — for the Soviet-American software house JV Dialog. It takes its idea from the knight’s tour, the classic chess puzzle of covering a board using only a knight’s L-shaped moves, and turns it into a fast, addictive score-chasing game.
How to play
You control a lone knight on a small tiled board and must keep moving it in its usual L-shaped pattern, choosing your next landing square from the spots the cursor highlights. Each tile changes color as it’s revisited, and after being landed on three times it turns into a hole the knight can no longer use, so the board steadily shrinks as you play. The goal is to collect hearts before you run out of safe squares: in A-Type mode a single heart sits still each round, while B-Type mode has several hearts that jump to new positions every six turns. Landing on a run of squares that immediately turn into holes builds a scoring chain, and a two-player versus mode lets a second knight race for the same hearts, first to five points winning.
Use the D-pad to pick which highlighted square the knight jumps to next, and confirm the move with the A button.
Tips
- Think a few jumps ahead rather than just the next one — the knight’s L-shaped move means some squares that look close are actually unreachable once neighboring tiles turn into holes.
- In B-Type mode, don’t chase a relocating heart across the board if it strands you in a corner with no safe landing squares left.
- Deliberately routing through tiles you’re about to wear out can set up a hole chain for bonus points, but only try it once you have a safe square already lined up.
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