The Red Queen

This puzzle has 64 words on a chess board and a chess-related quote from the Red Queen. A quick scan of the board will reveal several sets of related terms (fruit, drinks, weapons, parts of speech, numbers, etc.).

The set that should stand out is the names of queens. Not only are they queens, matching the title and the quote, and the puzzle's apparent theme, they are also the only proper names on the board. So queens are part of the answer, but probably not the whole answer - that would be too simple.

So what about queens? Queens are the most powerful chess piece and the Red Queen's quote suggest something about Alice being captured. So what can these queens capture? A peek at the position of the queens will reveal that they can capture just about everything except each other!

If we cross out all the words our queens can capture, we're quickly left with just three words: COLUMN VERBS THREE. Three column verbs? Verbs three column? Column three verbs!

Now there are a bunch of words in column three, and most of them are sometimes verbs:

AXE
TARGET
TACKLE
ABUSE
COMBAT
KILL


Ok, so now we've got a new bunch of words, but no definitive answer. What are these words trying to tell us? The first thing you'll notice is all those verbs are a bit violent. And they've got something else in common: their first letters spell "ATTACK", which matches both the verb's theme, the chess theme, and the queen's quote! This is our answer.

Some teams got a little hung up on various words not being usually used as verbs. But every single word in that list can be used as both a noun and a verb, which is of course true of many many nouns and verbs.

Other teams quickly found the queens but then got distracted by other words and forgot about the chess angle entirely.

(This puzzle was invented for this event and was inspired by the classic N-Queens problem.)