Please help with Chess puzzle

[Mishihari Lord]

One of my old GM friends back in Madison would always refer to these as "think like me" puzzles. Basically, the only way to solve them is to think like the GM/Writer. It's the same problem with all those old Infocom text adventure games.

I find the comparison to Infocom games to be very astute. Not that an RPG being like those games is a problem. I loved them and solved a lot of them back in the day.

The issue is that some of the answers took a long time to come to me. I would blow through a bunch wile playing then get stuck. The next day while eating lunch I would be thinking over the puzzle and think of the answer. In an RPG you really don't want something that takes that long to solve.