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The millennia-old pastime of chess has been enjoying an explosion of interest. Whether people are longing for any engaging hobby to keep themselves sane during the long wait, or they fell prey to a popular Netflix drama about a chess prodigy, competition is heating up. While games using a physical board will have to wait a bit longer for most of us, there are excellent online chess platforms and a healthy chess community available in a few clicks or thumb taps.
The game is the same no matter which of these options you choose, but features differ. Some apps and platforms target a more committed audience, while others are simpler and may suit those seeking to dabble against a less competitive crowd.
Chess.com (Desktop, iOS, Android)
The website with the most obvious name—Chess.com—delivers on its promise: Everyone from newbies to grandmasters has a place here. Games are available at any speed, with time limits for each move ranging from a brisk one minute per side to a leisurely five days.
You can just play and ignore the site’s other offerings, but for the curious, options abound. You can play against numerous AI-powered chess bots, each with its own strengths and playing style. Those looking for some noncompetitive study can learn through puzzles and tutorials, or watch chess livestreams (yes, this is very much a thing) and even find a mentor. The one thing that stymies your explorations on the site is a subscription paywall, which pops up in various places more serious players might wander, such as the opening explorer. You can still play as many games as you like without paying, whether against the computer or actual humans.
When you start playing, you’ll get assigned a rating that denotes your skill level. It will fluctuate wildly over your first several games, then settle into a narrower range. Once that happens, you’ll generally be matched against players who are within a stone’s throw of your skill level. Chess.com runs in any web browser, but there are also mobile apps for iOS and Android that successfully recreate the experience. Just know that on medium- to small-size phones, you may find it more difficult to scrutinize the board.
Subscriptions come in three tiers at $5, $7, and $14 per month, or around half those amounts if you pay for a year upfront. Every tier removes all ads, unlocks every bot, and allows for unlimited use of its game analysis tool in which an AI evaluates every move of your games and suggests alternatives. The middle tier allows unlimited access to the site’s chess puzzles, while the lowest tier allows you 25 puzzles per day. The top tier opens up Chess.com’s full video library of lessons and game analyses. There is so much to explore among the free options that it makes sense to start there, and it’s easy to scale up as warranted by your desire for chess dominance.
Lichess (Desktop, iOS, Android)
Lichess has all the same basic offerings as Chess.com: a large community, many game types, tutorials, puzzles, and livestreams. The site has a simple appearance, and it seems built to get you where you want to go in as few clicks as possible. You can create an account, but if you’re not concerned with tracking your games and finding other players at your level, there’s no need to log in. Just fire up a new game, try some puzzles, or watch a chess streamer play three-minute games while listening to techno and chatting with the comments section. Chess.com feels clunky and formal by comparison.
Both Chess.com and Lichess let you analyze your games afterward with the help of the renowned open-source chess engine Stockfish. Considered the top chess AI in the world until it was dethroned by Google’s AlphaZero, Stockfish can quickly analyze positions and assess which side is stronger and by how much. Lichess includes a nifty feature where you can see how many top players have played the moves you and your opponent played, and the outcomes of those games. You can even explore past games by masters that most resemble the one you just played. Lichess also produces a graph after each game to show you who was winning (according to Stockfish) at each move, and how much that advantage increased or decreased with each move.
The mobile apps (Android, iOS) recreate the browser experience, with the main limitation being your tolerance for examining a board on your screen. Perhaps most remarkable of all: Lichess offers all of this without any ads and never asks for money. It is run by a nonprofit and is funded by donations.
Board Game Arena (Desktop, mobile web)
In addition to chess, Board Game Arena has online versions of just about every well-known tabletop game you can think of. The chess games on the site are casual, and the competition is less fierce than what you'll find on the sites devoted to just chess. There is no clock ticking down the seconds you have to think before you automatically lose. Instead, Board Game Arena simply allows your opponent to boot you from the match if you get pulled away by real life or another browser window. And if you get tired of chess, you can try out any of the other 285 games the site offers.
Some of its games must be initiated by a paying member, but the vast majority, including chess, are free. There is no mobile app, but chess works fine on a mobile browser.
SocialChess (iOS, Android)
SocialChess (available for iOS and Android) is a good option if Lichess or Chess.com feel like too much of a chess bazaar, and you’d prefer a chess app that provides a smaller, more casual community. Unlike many mobile-only chess apps, this one comes without ads or tacky 3D game pieces. The game selection mechanism is nifty: You can create a challenge at any game speed you choose, or see a graph that lets you select open challenges based on the speed of the game and the opponent’s rating. You can also toggle various display options that can make it more visually apparent where you can move and where your opponent just moved. For $10 a year, you can get extra features that you probably don’t need, like game analyses and the ability to play more than five games at one time.
Really Bad Chess (iOS, Android)
One of the great allures of chess is that it has endured, unmodified, over centuries and across continents. All that storied history goes out the window with Really Bad Chess, a mobile app that generates bizarro opening setups: You might start the game with six queens, or have all of your pawns replaced by knights. For a seasoned player, it can help you see a familiar game with fresh eyes.
This free app, available for both iOS and Android, is pure silly fun, as long as you can forgive some rough edges. For instance, the app does not allow for draws, even when both sides repeat the same moves over and over (which should trigger the game to end in an automatic draw). Stalemates, in which one player has no legal moves, should also result in a tie, but they are treated like checkmates. You can’t play other humans, just the AI, which does not alter its strength, only the material it has to work with. The app starts by giving you a heavy piece advantage over the AI, and it gradually turns the tables if you demonstrate to the computer that you are up to the challenge.
Shredder Chess (Desktop, iOS, Android)
Shredder Chess (available for iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows) is a simple and excellent training app that provides puzzles and an AI that mimics human play and can adjust its strength to match yours. The simplicity of Shredder Chess lets you quickly start a game or try a few puzzles within a few seconds of launching the app, without thumbing through menus or reading through explanations. You can also play quick games directly in the browser.
The mobile apps are great. There are 1,000 puzzles to play in the $4 paid version of Shredder Chess on iOS. The free version, Shredder Chess Lite, limits you 100 puzzles. The full version of Shredder Chess on Android is $3.50, but a free option is not offered. The paid versions of the app also allow the AI to progress from a strong player to grandmaster level.
Learn Chess With Dr. Wolf (iOS, Android)
The training app Learn Chess With Dr. Wolf (available for iOS and Android) presents the chiseled visage of an old man—you can adjust his race and gender—as the countenance of the AI which coaches you with every move and adjusts its play based on yours. The good doctor is generally kind enough to blunder away the lead when it gets too far ahead in a game, and the comments often turn your moves into mini-puzzles. (“Can you see what I’m threatening?”) After three complementary games, you’ll be asked to sign up. A subscription costs $5 per month, or $35 per year.
Magnus Trainer (iOS, Android)
Magnus Trainer is pricy—$8 per month, $75 per year, or a one-time fee of $300—but learning from the best isn’t cheap. The puzzle and exercise set is hosted and narrated by world champ Magnus Carlsen, who appears in quick videos onscreen to pump his fist or smirk at you, depending on how you perform the tasks he provides. Examples provided in lessons generally come from Carlsen’s game history against other top players. The program is unique in how it offers not just chess instruction but also drills that improve your fundamental skills and teach pattern-recognition techniques that help you mentally plan ahead during games.
The apps (available on iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows) are quite comprehensive, with dozens of lessons and mini-courses. The aesthetics are unique among chess apps and have the look of a collector’s chess set instead of a cheap board you picked up at the local game store. The pieces are detailed, but not to the point of being distracting—not a trivial factor when one’s full mental capacity is required to truly get the most out of those steep fees. The apps follow a freemium model, where you download a free version and then make an in-app purchase to upgrade the experience. You can actually get a lot out of the free tier despite bumping into the paywall fairly regularly, but you’ll have to put up with regular nudges asking you to pay up.
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