With these digital options, you can improve your chess skills or learn the game from scratch.
Chess, a game that has been played for millennia, has recently attracted a lot of attention. Competition is escalating, whether it’s because people are looking for a stimulating hobby to keep them occupied during the protracted wait or because they were seduced by a popular Netflix drama about a chess prodigy. While most of us will have to wait a little longer to play games using a physical board, there are excellent online chess platforms and a thriving chess community accessible with a few clicks or thumb taps.
Whichever of these options you select, the game is the same, but the features are different. While some platforms and apps cater to a more devoted audience, others are simpler and may be more suitable for those looking to experiment with a less competitive crowd.
1. Chess.com.ng
Create a mobile optimised chess gaming platform for Nigeria.
Playing Chess is easy! It is a two-player board game played on an 8×8 chessboard between a white side and a black side. A Chess game has 32 pieces at the start, with 16 pieces for each side.
There are three phases of a chess game: The opening, the middle game, and the end game. You can play Chess with a chess clock.
Thanks to technological advancement, Chess is no longer exclusively played on a physical board.
2. Chess.com (Desktop, iOS, Android)
Chess.com, the website with the most blatantly obvious name, fulfills its promise that everyone, from beginners to grandmasters, has a place here. With time limits for each move ranging from a quick one minute per side to a leisurely five days, games can be played at any speed.
You can just play and ignore the website’s other features, but there are many options for those who are interested. You can play chess against a variety of AI-powered chess bots, each with unique playing characteristics and strengths. If you want to study without competing with others, you can do puzzles and tutorials, watch chess livestreams (yes, this is a thing), or even find a mentor. One obstacle to your site explorations is a subscription paywall, which appears in a number of locations where more serious players might stray, like the opening explorer. You can continue to play as many games as you want without paying, whether they are played against computers or real people.
You’ll be given a rating when you first start playing that indicates your level of expertise. Over the course of your first few games, it will fluctuate wildly before narrowing to a specific range. After that, you’ll typically be matched against players who are very close to your level of expertise. There are mobile apps for iOS and Android that successfully replicate the experience, in addition to Chess.com running in any web browser. Just be aware that it might be more challenging to examine the board on medium- to small-sized phones.
There are three levels of subscriptions available at $5, $7, and $14 per month, or roughly half those prices if you pay for a full year in advance. Every tier removes all advertisements, unlocks every bot, and grants unlimited access to its game analysis tool, which uses artificial intelligence to analyze each move you make in your games and offer alternatives. The lowest tier limits you to 25 puzzles per day, while the middle tier gives you unlimited access to the site’s chess puzzles. The top tier grants access to Chess.com’s entire video lesson and game analysis library. It makes sense to start with the free options because there is so much to learn about them, and it is simple to scale up as necessary to achieve your goal of chess dominance.
The Alternative
3. Lichess (Desktop, iOS, Android)
Similar to Chess.com, Lichess provides a large community, a variety of game types, tutorials, puzzles, and livestreams. The website looks straightforward and appears to be designed to take you where you want to go in the fewest number of clicks. There is no need to log in if you don’t care about keeping track of your games or finding other players who are at your skill level, although you can create an account. Just start a new game, solve some puzzles, or watch a chess streamer play three-minute games while you listen to techno music and engage in discussion in the comments section. In contrast, Chess.com seems stiff and formal.
You can use the renowned open-source chess engine Stockfish to analyze your games using both Chess.com and Lichess. Stockfish, once regarded as the best chess AI in the world before being ousted by Google’s AlphaZero, can analyze positions quickly and determine which side is stronger and by how much. A useful feature of Lichess allows you to view the number of top players who have made the moves you and your opponent have made as well as the results of those games. The master games from the past that most resemble the one you just played can even be explored. After every move, Lichess creates a graph that shows you who was winning (according to Stockfish) and how much that advantage changed over time.
The main restriction to using the mobile apps (Android, iOS) to simulate the browser experience is how patient you are with looking at a board on your screen. Perhaps most amazing of all, Lichess provides all of this without any advertisements or requests for payment. Donations are used to run and fund the nonprofit.
The Game Room
4. Board Game Arena (Desktop, mobile web)
Board Game Arena offers online versions of virtually every popular tabletop game you can imagine in addition to chess. The chess games played on the website are less competitive and more casual than those played on chess-only websites. The amount of time you have to think before you lose automatically is not timed by a clock. Instead, if you get distracted by real life or another browser window, Board Game Arena simply lets your adversary kick you out of the game. You can also try out any of the other 285 games on the website if you get bored of playing chess.
The vast majority of its games, including chess, are free, but some of them require the participation of a paying member. Chess can be played on a mobile browser even though there isn’t a mobile app.
The Chess Club
5. SocialChess (iOS, Android)
If Lichess or Chess.com feel like too much of a chess bazaar and you’d prefer a chess app that offers a smaller, more laid-back community, SocialChess (available for iOS and Android) is a good choice. This chess app is mobile-only, unlike many others, and it doesn’t have annoying 3D game pieces or ads. The way you choose a game to play is clever: You can create a challenge at any game speed you like, or you can look at a graph and choose from open challenges based on the game speed and the opponent’s rating. Additionally, you can switch between a number of display settings to make it easier to see where you can move and where your opponent has recently moved. You can purchase extra features like game analyses and the capacity to play more than five games simultaneously for $10 per year, features that you probably won’t use.
The Chaos Muppet
6. Really Bad Chess (iOS, Android)
One of the great allures of chess is that it has survived unchanged across centuries and continents. Really Bad Chess, a mobile app that generates bizarre opening setups, throws all of that history out the window. You could begin with six queens or have all of your pawns replaced by knights. It can help a seasoned player see a familiar game with new eyes.
As long as you can forgive some rough edges, this free app, available for both iOS and Android, is pure silly fun. For example, even when both sides repeat the same moves repeatedly, the app does not allow for draws (which should trigger the game to end in an automatic draw). Stalemates, which occur when one player has no legal moves, should also result in a tie, but they are treated similarly to checkmates. You can only play the AI, which does not change its strength but only the material it has to work with. The app begins by giving you a significant advantage over the AI, and it gradually turns the tables if you show the computer that you are up to the task.
The Trainer
7. Shredder Chess (Desktop, iOS, Android)
Shredder Chess (available for iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows) is a straightforward and effective training app that features puzzles and an AI that mimics human play and can adjust its strength to match yours. Shredder Chess’s simplicity allows you to start a game or try a few puzzles within a few seconds of launching the app, without having to thumb through menus or read through explanations. Quick games can also be played directly in the browser.
The mobile apps are fantastic. The $4 paid version of Shredder Chess on iOS includes 1,000 puzzles. Shredder Chess Lite’s free version is limited to 100 puzzles. The full version of Shredder Chess for Android costs $3.50, but there is no free option. The AI can also progress from strong player to grandmaster level in the paid versions of the app.
The Scholar
8. Learn Chess With Dr. Wolf (iOS, Android)
Learn Chess With Dr. Wolf (iOS and Android) presents the chiseled face of an old man—you can change his race and gender—as the countenance of the AI that coaches you with every move and adjusts its play based on yours. When you get too far ahead in a game, the good doctor is usually kind enough to blunder away the lead, and the comments frequently turn your moves into mini-puzzles. (“Can you see what I’m getting at?”) You’ll be asked to sign up after three complementary games. A monthly subscription is $5, or $35 per year.
The Champion
9. Magnus Trainer (iOS, Android)
Magnus Trainer is expensive ($8 per month, $75 per year, or $300 one-time fee), but learning from the best isn’t cheap. World champion Magnus Carlsen hosts and narrates the puzzle and exercise set, appearing in quick videos onscreen to pump his fist or smirk at you depending on how you complete the tasks he provides. Examples in lessons are typically drawn from Carlsen’s game history against other top players. The program is unique in that it teaches not only chess but also drills to improve fundamental skills and pattern-recognition techniques to help you mentally plan ahead during games.