![]() The mobile platform now dominates the Internet. Many more YouTube videos are watched on mobile devices (mostly smartphones) than on desktop and laptop computers combined. ![]() Two months ago, Google announced that the majority of its searches are now performed on mobile devices in 10 countries, including the United States and Japan. The mobile platform is only going to grow in the future, so if you haven’t already, it’s time to take your chess game with you on your smartphone. Here are the eight best chess apps available on the two major mobile platforms today. Selected are the best chess apps of various different types: games/puzzles, aesthetics, streaming, beginners, analysis, clocks, and live chess. Of course, Magnus Carlsen gets his own category. Let us know your favorite mobile chess apps in the comments section or on. Available on and. Chess Light is a unique puzzle-solving game using chess moves as the answers. It's got a gorgeous, minimalist UI, and is fun to play, but it won’t improve your chess ability — or will it? At the very least, playing Chess Light will help your board visualization skills. Chess Live Wallpaper only. Beautiful live chess images that respond to your touch. You can use this as the wallpaper for your phone, and make the image ripple and move to relieve your chess stress. Twitch Available on and. Use this app to watch all major Chess.com events and broadcasts, as well as every other online game you can think of. Check out the many available on Twitch, and hit the follow button to be notified when there is a live broadcast. Chess For Kids Available on and. This app is perfect for students and beginners, with its focus on fundamentals, rules, and basic lessons. Don't miss 4. Play Magnus Available on and. This highly polished chess app is based on the game's best player and current world champion, Magnus Carlsen. You can play and learn from the virtual Magnus at different simulated ages. DroidFish (Stockfish) Available on and. ![]() You could say it's like having a grandmaster in your pocket, but this is hugely underselling its playing strength. Mobile Stockfish is a must-have app for serious chess analysis on the go. For more computer chess, check out the Chess.com match 2. Chess Clock Available on and It's a fully functional chess clock with delay and increment modes, and it's completely free. This app is the most portable chess clock possible, because you’re always carrying your phone with you. Oct 31, 2000 Does anyone know of a FREE Chess game for Pocket PC? Chess.com Available on and. The obvious choice for number one, but it's really (by far) the best chess app for pretty much everything you'd want to do with the game. You can read the finest chess articles online, make new chess friends, watch instructive video lessons, and solve more than 50,000 tactics puzzles. The Chess.com app has the most beautiful live and daily chess user interface, and starting a game is quick and easy. What are your favorite chess apps? Let us know in the comment section. Back in the 1980s, I tinkered with the very first chess computers - they were primitive, slow and unambitious. Over the years I've dipped into chess applications on PCs and it's been amazing how far both the AI and, of course, the processing power available to 'think ahead' have come. I'm a decent chess player ( I did once take grandmaster John Nunn to about 30 moves and 45 minutes, but that was (ahem) when he was playing a dozen of us at the same time.), but nowhere near the best club players overall, I haven't studied enough. Most of the games here played at, or above my level without needing to take many minutes to think about each move. Unlike my old chess computer from the 80s! I've deliberately concentrated here on playing chess against your phone - if there's enough interest, I'll do a companion round-up looking at playing chess online on the phone, i.e. Against other human players. Extremely glossy and with a full 3D real-time-rendered board, this is immediately impressive - and, with a wide choice in time options and difficulty levels, hard to beat too, being not afraid to use an attacking style rather than the ultra-defensive techniques found in computer chess. The moves that are being considered are flashed up in red in real time, which is interesting and cool, and my only complaints were that moving pieces wasn't always easy in my chosen view - in order to tap on squares accurately, I sometimes had to rotate the board vertically in order to see it from a more top-down point of view. A really nice, pannable 3D board. Note the animated red squares below, when the AI is thinking, the principle moves being explored get highlighted. Overall, very impressed though. Simply named, only available in free form, and with 'modern' social links and banner ads, this game is nonetheless pretty effective, putting up a good chess performance on a simple 2D board. Half a dozen difficulty levels culminate in 'Master', which equates to up to ten seconds of thinking and is about right for an enjoyable game. Available in ad-supported or paid forms, and dating back to 2012 and the days of 'Metro'(!), this is still a comprehensive option, including puzzles, teaching aids, online play, and more. The chess engine is pretty good too. As with all the games here, I played it on maximum difficulty and was given a tough time. Never mind the age, this is a top chess application. A wide variety of playing and learning options. Playing against the AI - it's a clear layout and swiping to one side reveals all the moves etc. The online lectures are a very neat idea. All pre-programmed, but very informative. The official title from chess.com and regularly updated, this includes playing against your phone, but at a fairly basic 'quick' level only - there's no configuration to ramp up the difficulty. The bulk of this title is online, so I'll return to it in my follow-up article in the future. There's no doubting the graphical prowess here, you can pan and zoom the pieces and almost move between them around the board while playing. Not that any of this helps gameplay - even a 'reset view' control can't make up for there being so much texture that it's often hard to distinguish pieces from each other. There's a choice of difficulty levels but they don't go as high, in terms of real world expertise, as some of the other games here. Online options add more, but again, that's for a future feature. Another full pan and spin environment. In fact, look how close you can get:(!) Available in ad-supported or again, this is perhaps the premier opponent on all mobile platforms, the. It's tremendously configurable and the single best feature is that at any point the 'best line of thinking' of the AI is shown, complete with what it thinks your response might be. Not only giving you a hint as to what to perhaps do next but also giving you a valuable heads-up and - effectively - more thinking time. _____________ Yes, there are other chess games in the Store, but I think I've covered the main ones, at least in terms of 'local' (on your phone) play. Picking two to play each other in real time, head to head, is trickier. ChessGenius is a slam-dunk, of course, I can't ignore its pedigree. But most of the other titles seem of similar standard. If Chess4All had been kept up to date then this would have been my pick, but I'm going to plump for 3D Chess Game Free'. Partly because this too also 'shows its workings', but also because, being graphically very pretty it's perhaps the polar opposite of ChessGenius. But how will its engine stand up against Richard Lang's creation? As it turns out, pretty well. To get the two games playing each other, I used the facility in ChessGenius to play as 'black' and thus entered the moves from one game into the other - for the next 30 minutes! I set 3D Chess Game Free to level 14 and ChessGenius to 'Move in 30 seconds' - my aim was to get the two chess engines calculating moves for roughly the same amount of time. I also used two different Windows Phones, which I suppose adds another small element of randomness, but I've (albeit in a graphical context) that the Snapdragon 400-based phones run at a roughly equivalent speed in terms of processing to the older S4, so Lumia 640 XL vs Lumia 1020 should still be a pretty fair fight. And so it proved. With two AI engines at work, neither of which were likely to make an obvious mistake, the game proved tactical and rather slow, with no attacking leaps (as would happen if a human player left a weakness) - 3D Chess Game did remarkably well through the opening and mid-game, I was in fact resigned to having to declare a draw. But as soon as the positions became more about tactics and less about raw 'what happens if X then Y then Z', then Chess Genius drew ahead, with a vastly better handling of the end game. Heading into the midgame after a slightly odd opening (odd to see that black queen so mobile so quickly) - and nearing the end of the game (black is ultimately vulnerable to that passed pawn of white's - but it could have its own by pushing the knight pawn forward etc. - somehow 3D Chess Game missed this, which is unforgiveable!) _____________ Picking an overall winner isn't hard - ChessGenius still rules the roost in terms of raw playing ability in all phases of the game, plus it has a very clear interface and is supremely flexible. Grab the if you want to try and then support the developer with the - the cost is utterly trivial compared to the hundreds of hours of mental battles you'll enjoy. Mind you, I was also pleasantly surprised overall by the strength of most of the other contenders here - as they're all either free or available in a free, ad-supported form, just follow the links and knock yourself out! Meta, Share, Comments Filed: > > Platforms: Categories.
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