Huntinality 2022/Triangular Moves

Triangular Moves is a word puzzle in the COO round of Huntinality 2022.

Solve Path
The puzzle includes a triangularly-tiled grid and two sets of clues, titled "Rows" and "Blooms". Solvers can begin by solving the clues normally. As with a normal Rows Garden, the Bloom clue answers are all 6 letters long and entered into the hexagon-shaped areas, turning either clockwise or counterclockwise, and the Row clues need to be used to figure out where to put them.

The Bloom clues are sorted into eight groups, with each group accompanied by a picture of one of the Sailor Guardians from Sailor Moon. If solvers mark where each Sailor Guardian's clue answers end up on the grid, they'll find that these 8 groups make up 8 contiguous regions (the grid is already pre-divided in the casual version).

Now the flavor comes into play: It is full of chess-related terms ("check", "mate", "king", "queen", "knights"). However, it also mentions "unicorns", which are not an ordinary chess piece, and the puzzle takes place on a triangular grid rather than a square one. With some research, solvers may come across Triangular Chess, a chess variant that is played on a triangular grid, and notably includes unicorns, and has its own piece move patterns, which are different from ordinary chess.

At the center of each hex on the grid is either a white or a black circle, with one black circle for each region. The black circle always touches a single K (standing for "king"), being the "dark king" mentioned in the flavor text. The letters B, K, N, P, Q, R and U stand for the chess pieces Bishop, King, kNight, Pawn, Queen, Rook and Unicorn, respectively, with each black circle surrounded entirely by black pieces, and the other way round for white circles. We can now treat each region as an independent chess puzzle, and try to find a way to checkmate the king with the white pieces.

It turns out that each region has a unique mate-in-1 available. Once solvers find the checkmates, they should note down the letters to which the mating piece has to be moved. However, these won't spell out the answer in normal reading order. Instead, the extracted letters read out the final answer when ordered by the Sailor Guardians' distance from the sun.

Track Differences
As with the other puzzles in Huntinality 2022, there are differences between the casual and expert tracks' versions of this puzzle.

In the Casual track,

Puzzle Elements
Grid-Centric (Triangular Tiling) - The puzzle grid has triangular tiling.

Rows Garden - The puzzle grid is a classic rows garden; however, the bloom clues are given in 8 groups and are not indicated by color.

Chess Puzzle - After filling in the grid, solvers have to find a checkmate in each of the 8 regions on the grid, after translating certain letters to chess pieces.