Even if you’re no grandmaster, you might think you know chess. These iPhone games suggest otherwise. They take the basic premise of chess and experiment, sometimes stretching the original game to breaking point.
The result is a collection of board and puzzle games that subvert convention. For newcomers and old hands alike, they are ideal for on-the-go play, and force you to ‘think different’ – a boon for when you later return to more traditional matches.
Rule breakers
Games that take the rules of chess, gleefully bend them, and occasionally throw them out altogether.
Chessplode (free)
This one mixes chess with explosions. When you capture a piece, everything within its line and column is obliterated. The exception is when a king is present, at which point a “boring” (as in, standard) chess capture occurs.
Daily challenges and scores of levels created by fans make sure you never run out of new puzzles to try. And you can even dig into multiplayer battles with friends – offline and online. It’s superb fun.
Really Bad Chess (free or $4/£4)
Most chess games offer multiple difficulty levels. Really Bad Chess has just one. But it switches things up by starting you off with much better pieces than the computer player. If you win, your rank increases – and your pieces get worse.
Get good enough and you eventually start at a disadvantage, which can be tough. If that all feels like too much effort, you can further your skills by dipping into the daily challenge or freeplay training modes.
Losing Chess (free or $2/£2)
With a visual style apparently inspired by Really Bad Chess, Losing chess upends the classic game in a different way. It wants you to lose – as rapidly as possible. The snag is, your opponent’s trying to do the same.
The game doesn’t want you to hang around either. Compulsory captures force you to throw your usual chess strategies out of the window, while “Play 960” randomizes the starting pieces – although, mercifully, gives both players the same setup.
Weird Chess (free)
If you want an entire toybox of unusual chess variations to try, Weird Chess should be an immediate download. Even its conventional “Standard Chess” can be upended by an optional pigeon attack. And things get considerably stranger from there.
You can try to survive a pawn invasion, hide your opponent’s pieces in a fog of war, or play “King of the Hill,” which challenges you to get your king to the center of the board first. The rudimentary visuals are a pity, but the sheer variety makes Weird Chess a must.
Puzzle pieces
Chess distilled into bite-sized puzzles, ideal for a quick challenge when you only have a few minutes to spare.
Pocket Chess (free or $5/£5)
This game comes across like the chess puzzles you find in newspapers – but in microcosm. Its puzzles often take place on fragments of boards, and they each give you a limited number of moves to defeat your opponent.
It’s well-suited to long-time players wanting to sharpen skills in a minute of downtime. But Pocket Chess is also great for newcomers, teaching you how to play efficiently – and when best to sacrifice pieces in order to win.
Knight Saves Queen (free or $2/£2)
There’s character in this puzzler that features the titular knight bounding about, attempting to rescue his queen. At first, it’s simple: move in L-shaped patterns, duff up bad guys, and end on Her Maj.
Before long, you face more varied foes, each based on a chess piece, and get allies too. Those are used to manipulate opponents into place, so you can get stabby with your knight, always aiming to clear the board in as few moves as possible.
Chess Peace (free or $9/£9)
It’s amusing that “peace” within this excellent game comes from ensuring that none of the chess pieces can take each other. The only way to keep these warmongers apart, apparently, is to make sure they can never get within striking distance.
What’s perhaps surprising is that although you’re only placing a handful of pieces on a grid, finding a configuration in which nobody can attack anybody else can be fiendishly difficult. Fortunately, the app wants you to find peace too, hence its handy hints system.
Chess Music ($2/£2)
This one reminds me a lot of one of the games in Duolingo, which has you fling a queen around the board, capturing pieces for points – while trying not to get captured yourself. But Chess Music adds a number of twists.
Get captured and it’s game over. The board also quickly fills if you fail to make captures fast enough, turning a simple exercise into a frantic scramble. And then there’s the “music,” which is strange and discordant. The core puzzling is great though.
Chess adventures
Games that turn chess into an adventure, adding exploration, upgrades, enemies, and a healthy dose of chaos.
Ouroboros King (free or $8/£8)
The most overtly adventure-oriented game in this roundup, Ouroboros King finds the hero on a mission to defeat the evil Coven. You start by recruiting your team, comprising chess and chess-like pieces, and then set off across a procedurally generated map.
Each stop on your journey is a chess board, on which a typical game takes place. That is, if your typical games of chess involve obstructions on the board, enemies with different abilities, and the need to always take down the opposing king.
Shotgun King ($4/£4)
Having become lazy and cruel, the black king finds himself abandoned, with his entire entourage having defected. Unsurprisingly, he’s a little miffed about this and decides to exact his revenge with the aid of his trusty shotgun.
What follows is a decidedly bonkers take on chess, where your opponents move much as expected, but you stomp around the board, blowing away the opposition. Further depth comes from cards that upgrade your king and the other side.
Gambonanza ($6/£6)
If you imagine chess as seen through the lens of Balatro, it’d probably look a lot like Gambonanza. The aim is to wipe out your opponent. But, as in Balatro, winning rounds is only part of the challenge – you must also think about how to build your advantage over the long term.
Between rounds, there’s a shop. Within, you can recruit new pieces, upgrade tiles, and activate “gambits” that change the rules of the game. It’s simple enough to get started, tough to master, and dangerously compelling.
Pawnbarian (free + $5/£5)
This game perhaps veers furthest from traditional chess, although it’s not entirely removed from the original concept. Pawnbarian combines chess-like moves with dungeon crawling, having you play chess-piece cards to move around a checkerboard grid and defeat enemies.
It looks simple, but Pawnbarian has lashings of tactical depth. There are power-ups to use, and enemies that have their own unique skills. The free version is a great introduction. With a one-off IAP, you unlock extra characters and dungeons.