You are limited to 50 puzzles when off the network, and when you reconnect, the next 50 (or the delta between how many you played and 50) are redownloaded.
CT-ART 4.0 is the gold standard. Again, not fully free, but it has some very instructional features, like playing against alternate moves, solving mini versions of a puzzle, playing the opposite side etc. Used it for years.
To be fair you shouldn't be sitting in the bathroom for that long because you'll develop hemorrhoids.
Maybe he's really good at chess?
(Unlike my former co-worker who would monopolize the one men's room stall for two hours at a stretch doing chess puzzles on his phone, and I'd have to go to the IT building. Gross.)
Amazing! Would love “premoves” so that I can input the next move before the first move’s animation completes. This will help maintain flow state for your more experienced users.
See chessbook for an app that does this really well.
great app, I like the adaptive style, but one piece of feedback is that, sometimes it is not clear what the goal is. For example, the language "Brilliant queen win ahead!" tells me, right, I am going to checkmate for the win with the queen in this game. But, actually the puzzle is to instead win the queen piece. "win" in chess to me always means checkmate.
The goal is always the best move. You shouldn't think of "what is my goal?", you should be finding the best move. This is something I struggled with as a beginner. There is always a best move, find it. Don't search for "the goal".
I will change the confusing wording like this but for now I can tell you this, if it mentions a piece by name then the puzzle is about winning that piece and not the game. Thank you for trying the app out.
Subtext is that the solution is always the best possible move sequence. OP’s comment is clarifying that sometimes after executing the best move sequence, the puzzle ends with a capture, and sometimes ends with a checkmate (“winning”).
For what it's worth, the entire Lichess corpus of puzzles (over five million positions with solutions and theming tags) is available for download in CSV format at https://database.lichess.org/#puzzles
I downloaded this and wrote a small program to filter on 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 move puzzles. I also segregated by rating. Then I ran them thru stockfish (there are some errors) and generated several years worth of daily puzzles. It’s part of a daily chess feed I have for my club. So, puzzles get harder thru the week, similar to NY times crossword puzzles. I uploaded this to my cheapo web server. I give credit to lichess and provide a link to play the position on the lichess.org website.
1. I enabled them by default because I thought most people won't even know about their existence if they weren't there but if someone is bothered by them they will definitely find the menu item and disable it.
2. I will add an option to enable auto advance in future update.
3. That typo is embarrassing — thanks for catching it! There’s always something that slips through.
I went to find the setting (independently of this message, I'd prefer it off by default, but seems fine either way) and I actually can't open the menu, which I assume is the three dots I can see in the top of my phone. It appears to be behind my notification bar?
The Offchess text in the top left is behind my phone's clock as well. Maybe just some padding is needed?
Android 15, Nothing phone 2 if it matters. Message me if you'd like more details.
This happened because latest Android version explicitly needs to be told not to go edge-to-edge. It's been fixed, stalling in the Google Play App Review, might take a day or two but as soon as you update it will be fiex. Also, yes there is a menu item to turn hints off.
I'm just about to leave for a long international flight, so this is absolutely perfect for me!
Glad I saw the comment about it being paid so I could get to the purchase screen before I lost internet. (As a side note, it says "Buy now for $3.99" but it's really $5.99 in my currency. Not sure if you can make the button match to the price in the locale)
It is just a placeholder for the price in your currency. Sometimes the play billing library takes a little while to get the price from the server. If you swipe up the app from app drawer(force close) and open it again it should show the correct price in your currency.
This looks really cool! I can't remember what article I was reading the other day but it was advocating for local first software as being the true goal of creating user friendly software -> this app absolutely meet's that goal. Looking forwards to using it.
I don't want to detract in the slightest from this fantastic app (I will be getting it shortly), I just want to point out another set of Chess puzzles for folk like me that enjoy this stuff. Check out the World Champs app, it has puzzles (mostly) taken from actual end games:
Very cool app. Chess.com costs too much and lichess is rather ugly and has barebones puzzle support. I like how you can choose different categories. Will be using this from now on.
Btw you have "Egnlish Opening" misspelled.
For tactics I really like chesstempo.com. It has free, unlimited puzzles. It is to my mind superior for tactics training. It also has a comments feature which I really like.
TacticsMaster on F-Droid also says it has 100k puzzles, sourced from https://database.lichess.org/#puzzles, though that says it has 5 million puzzles, so perhaps 100k is just a coincidence, a nice number, or maybe of the 5m there's a nice subset.
> Generating these chess puzzles took more than 100 years of CPU time.
The page includes a link to the puzzle generator and tagger for interests sake.
Not OP but generating puzzles isn’t hard if you have a database of games and I’ve done it myself.
For each game just fast forward to the end and ask for Stockfish to provide the solution. If it’s guaranteed “mate in X” then you’ve got yourself a puzzle. You can have a classifier that grabs other puzzle types too (“win the queen in X” for example)
At scale, It gets a little harder trying to explain the solution. There is often a combinatorial explosion of move possibilities, so it’s not easy to just say MATE IN 4 if there are 40 or 50 potential responses all leading to mate. Granted they are obvious mates but there may be users who do not see the obvious mates.
Thanks for your feedback, In the upcoming update I will...
1. add a toggle to disable sounds.
2. add an option to enable auto advance in future update.
It plays sound when the device is muted, has no preference to disable sound for the app, and moreover, the sound effects interfere with playing media, i.e. when I make a move the app pauses my music, playing in the background, to make a sound of a moving pawn.
Nice app. Using moto edge 60 pro. The app navigation gets hidden under the phone navigation icons. I'd like to pay. Except without user login, I am unable to figure out if the purchase can be linkedin to my 2-3 devices (each of which may use a different Google account)
Thanks! A couple of other people in this thread have mentioned that bug too and I'll get it fixed ASAP.
There's no login required since the app uses Google Play Billing on Android and App Store billing on iOS. That also means purchases are tied to the Google account used to buy the app, so unfortunately they can't be shared across different accounts.
I hate the annoyance of apps forcing you to create an account before you even try them and that's exactly why I kept it simple and login-free. But yeah, the trade-off is stuff like what you pointed out. To balance that, I made it a one-time low-cost purchase instead of a subscription. Hope that makes it fair.
> That also means purchases are tied to the Google account used to buy the app, so unfortunately they can't be shared across different accounts.
I don't have hand-to-hand experience with Google Play, but quite a few of those billing platforms offer "discount codes." So to help the GP commenter, I would imagine they could email you from their purchasing Google account and ask for 100% off codes for their other Google account addresses
I don't know how to help the sibling comment, short of you just straight-up making them a custom .apk without Play Billing. FWIW, it's actually absolutely painless to host your own f-droid repository <https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver#what-is-f-droid-serve...>. It's marked AGPL but despite its name one doesn't need to run that package to host a repo, just $($HOMEBREW_PREFIX/bin/fdroid update --verbose --create-metadata -W error) and then $(rsync -Pav --delete ./repo/ your-awesome-host:/repo/)
It's so painless you could even do that per user, as in lucb1e-fdroid.example.com or lucb1e-a6d7c104-e9b1-4ddc-ad5a-470e51bb5069.example.com
> There's no login required since the app uses Google Play Billing
...so it requires logging in with a Google account. That means I won't be able to buy the app on my phone
A one-time purchase for an offline privacy-friendly app is 100% fair and the price point and free tier seem great to me (someone upthread said it's like 4.7€ if you want more than 7 puzzles per day iirc), but please just add an option to send you money directly via e.g. IBAN. It's one of the few privacy-friendly options and you also get to keep all of the money
Most other options cut people out: paypal doesn't work half the time ("sorry, something went wrong" when the algorithm hates you today), stripe has issues when your bank and residence country don't match, credit card requires a good credit score, etc. It's all data- and algorithm-based, whereas banks are legally obliged to give you a functional account because it underpins so much of society nowadays. I'd be happy to pay for the app even without using it as a way to add my 'two cents' and hopefully make this more worth your time
I will definitely look into supporting alternative payment methods, someone else also has a de-googled phone and asked for the same in this thread too. I wonder if any of the alternative payment methods has a sdk that I can integrate directly or I will have to go the old school way of using software keys.
almost certainly implies it's not a technical hurdle that they're facing. Plus, purchasing would require giving Google payment details, which would necessarily include billing address, and now it's tied to your phone. I could very easily imagine that giving a lot of folks a lot of heartburn
Huh? Try it, since like ten years it requires validating the account with a phone number, which in many countries requires going through government verification. That alone takes a while to set up if you want a new account that isn't linked to other things already. It's not a quick as generating a new password in your password manager and coming up with a non-taken username anymore
You also can't log into this app specifically, it will tie all apps on your device to this one account. Nobody should be doing this, it's like logging into the Chrome browser and tying all pages that have any sort of google service on it (embedded map, youtube, analytics, ads) to the phone number and thus identity you signed up with
Is it the animation of the piece moving? I’ve tested it on a bunch of iOS devices and haven’t noticed anything odd, but I’d love to take a closer look. If you can, please share a video or GIF. It’ll really help. You can email it to me at support@offchess.com. Thanks for trying my app out and giving feedback.
It takes both yours and puzzle's rating in consideration while calculating. Just below the chessboard you can see "+12 -10" that means this puzzle will gain you 12 points if you solve this or you will lose 10 points if you fail.
Nice, bought to replace 'chess tactics puzzles' the addition of rating changes sold me.
Too late did I notice that there is no share fen button. I use that for harder puzzles when I want to understand why a given solution wouldn't work. Mostly just share to Chessis.
This is a nice app, but I have one bug report: When I tap on a piece, and it can capture another piece, it looks like it just can't move that way. Capturable pieces should have their background change somehow, to indicate that I can capture them.
Yeah, that’s more me being lazy than an actual bug. I left it like that assuming most people would figure it out anyway — but you’re right, it’s bad design. I’ll add a border around the "capturable" pieces.
Thanks, it left me a bit baffled the first time, as it seemed to say I can't capture the piece, when I knew I could. I tried anyway, and it worked, but it was confusing.
The app is full screen on my Samsung mobile so your bottom navigation is underneath the onscreen Android navigation and unusable. Happy to submit an issue and screenshots if you have a GitHub repo.
I'm really sorry about your experience. Could you please let me know your device name and screen size? I will make sure to fix this, along with any other bugs people report here and push an update to the app stores by tonight.
Sometimes it takes a while for Google Pla to distribute the update in different parts of the world. Check Google Play in a few hours and it should be there. I have confirmed with multiple people and they say the issue has been fixed with the update. If you still have the issue you can always mail me.
You had me when you said some of your best thinking happens in the bathroom.
Looks cool. On Android the UI seems to extend below the status bar at the top and below the drawer at the bottom of the screen which creates some overlapping though.
It says "stub for offtopicness" but, skimming them, literally all comments are on-topic. Not all substantial ('very nice app', 'whats the tech stack?') but a lot of other comments are a normal amount of substantial and also in there... I don't get it, but note that you can expand that subthread
Sorry about this. I've moved most of the comments in the stub back to the main thread.
We've recently had some threads about new product announcements in which the thread quickly fills up with "booster" comments from new accounts or old/dormant accounts that come back to life just to post these comments. The "stub" is a way to hide those comments without penalizing/hiding the main thread and the product it's about.
We were getting some emails and comments suggesting that this was happening here too, so I started trying to address it by moving some comments into the stub, intending to spend more time figuring out which ones were authentic and which ones seemed inorganic, but was slow to get back to it.
I think in this case, most or even all of the comments are actually organic or authentic; people just really love a good chess app!
Thank you for clarifying! No worries about the delay of course, we all have more things to do. Do I understand correctly that a 'booster comment' is about steering the conversation / making the product look well-liked to those who open the thread, and not that it boosts the submission up in some way? (If you can say that in light of people gaming it)
In this case the "things to do" was sleep, and the overarching issue is trying to do moderation work that really requires peak cognition when it's late and you're falling asleep, then leaving it half-done.
By "booster" comments we just mean comments that are highly positive but low on substance. "Great app!". "Congrats on the launch!". Comments like that are often an indication that a friendship network has been rallied to show public support and create "social proof". But often these kinds of commenters try to get clever and add in Dorothy Dixer questions about the tech stack or something else to make the comment seem more authentic and substantive, and enable more details to be shared.
Often when that happens, it's green (new) accounts or old/dormant accounts posting the comments and upvoting the thread, but there wasn't much of that here (though there was a little, which is what aroused suspicion).
But these comments don't have any effect on the thread's ranking. It's only a vibes effect.
I can assure you I didn't ask a single person I know to comment on this, most of my irl friends don't even know what hackernews is. All comments, even the ones that are hidden now are organic.
Even I thought it's weird that an 8 year old dormant account decided to comment on my post but I have nothing to do with that.
I'm also wondering if it's an automatic classification. Wouldn't expect that on HN, but the posts in there are so random that it almost must be.
As for that specific comment, to be fair, I could actually understand: promoting your own product in someone else's thread without really saying anything at all about the submission (topic) that was posted could be seen as off-topic. I don't really mind it (I don't think I voted on it), but I could see a human also classify it that way
Yeah , that's fair. More than promotion i was trying to suggest i had also built something similar and kind of understand the product space. It's this dev thing, can't shake it off i guess. But i get what you meant.
Apart from that i have a theory that there is a lot of ML based ranking and classification that is happening at the backend.
Can you please explain what it means? I have been using HN for years and only seeing this for the first time. Seems like some mod action but searching on google didn't return anything.
A bit off topic, but since you mentioned doing your best thinking in the bathroom, two things you should try are (a) no caffeine, and (b) no soy. These should dramatically cut down on the number of times you have to go and how long it takes.
As it was not clear from the description, there's a one-time payment (4.29€) to get more than 7 puzzles in a day.
Lichess also offers a good alternative to this, although their offline support is limited.
You are limited to 50 puzzles when off the network, and when you reconnect, the next 50 (or the delta between how many you played and 50) are redownloaded.
Maybe he's really good at chess?
(Unlike my former co-worker who would monopolize the one men's room stall for two hours at a stretch doing chess puzzles on his phone, and I'd have to go to the IT building. Gross.)
See chessbook for an app that does this really well.
Overall great app.
I like the feature because it updates my rank when I get internet restored. I just wish they cached more than 50 offline.
Chess.com doesn't offer this option, so would be a neat differentiator :)
- Text hints should probably be off by default, they give too much of a hint.
- Auto-advance to next puzzle would be helpful, clicking “next puzzle” gets tiresome.
- Typo in the puzzle categories list: “Egnlish Opening”
2. I will add an option to enable auto advance in future update.
3. That typo is embarrassing — thanks for catching it! There’s always something that slips through.
I went to find the setting (independently of this message, I'd prefer it off by default, but seems fine either way) and I actually can't open the menu, which I assume is the three dots I can see in the top of my phone. It appears to be behind my notification bar?
The Offchess text in the top left is behind my phone's clock as well. Maybe just some padding is needed?
Android 15, Nothing phone 2 if it matters. Message me if you'd like more details.
Glad I saw the comment about it being paid so I could get to the purchase screen before I lost internet. (As a side note, it says "Buy now for $3.99" but it's really $5.99 in my currency. Not sure if you can make the button match to the price in the locale)
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chess-puzzles-world-champions/...
> Generating these chess puzzles took more than 100 years of CPU time.
The page includes a link to the puzzle generator and tagger for interests sake.
For each game just fast forward to the end and ask for Stockfish to provide the solution. If it’s guaranteed “mate in X” then you’ve got yourself a puzzle. You can have a classifier that grabs other puzzle types too (“win the queen in X” for example)
https://raymondsmullyan.com/books/the-chess-mysteries-of-the...
I have only used OffChess briefly but one feature request I have is to remove the possible path of the piece when clicking on it (like Lichess).
Another improvement would be the placement of the “next puzzle” button, that seems to be in a crowded place.
- it plays sound even when my (iOS) device is muted
- would love an option to automatically go to next puzzle
There's no login required since the app uses Google Play Billing on Android and App Store billing on iOS. That also means purchases are tied to the Google account used to buy the app, so unfortunately they can't be shared across different accounts.
I hate the annoyance of apps forcing you to create an account before you even try them and that's exactly why I kept it simple and login-free. But yeah, the trade-off is stuff like what you pointed out. To balance that, I made it a one-time low-cost purchase instead of a subscription. Hope that makes it fair.
I don't have hand-to-hand experience with Google Play, but quite a few of those billing platforms offer "discount codes." So to help the GP commenter, I would imagine they could email you from their purchasing Google account and ask for 100% off codes for their other Google account addresses
I don't know how to help the sibling comment, short of you just straight-up making them a custom .apk without Play Billing. FWIW, it's actually absolutely painless to host your own f-droid repository <https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroidserver#what-is-f-droid-serve...>. It's marked AGPL but despite its name one doesn't need to run that package to host a repo, just $($HOMEBREW_PREFIX/bin/fdroid update --verbose --create-metadata -W error) and then $(rsync -Pav --delete ./repo/ your-awesome-host:/repo/)
It's so painless you could even do that per user, as in lucb1e-fdroid.example.com or lucb1e-a6d7c104-e9b1-4ddc-ad5a-470e51bb5069.example.com
...so it requires logging in with a Google account. That means I won't be able to buy the app on my phone
A one-time purchase for an offline privacy-friendly app is 100% fair and the price point and free tier seem great to me (someone upthread said it's like 4.7€ if you want more than 7 puzzles per day iirc), but please just add an option to send you money directly via e.g. IBAN. It's one of the few privacy-friendly options and you also get to keep all of the money
Most other options cut people out: paypal doesn't work half the time ("sorry, something went wrong" when the algorithm hates you today), stripe has issues when your bank and residence country don't match, credit card requires a good credit score, etc. It's all data- and algorithm-based, whereas banks are legally obliged to give you a functional account because it underpins so much of society nowadays. I'd be happy to pay for the app even without using it as a way to add my 'two cents' and hopefully make this more worth your time
almost certainly implies it's not a technical hurdle that they're facing. Plus, purchasing would require giving Google payment details, which would necessarily include billing address, and now it's tied to your phone. I could very easily imagine that giving a lot of folks a lot of heartburn
You also can't log into this app specifically, it will tie all apps on your device to this one account. Nobody should be doing this, it's like logging into the Chrome browser and tying all pages that have any sort of google service on it (embedded map, youtube, analytics, ads) to the phone number and thus identity you signed up with
What happened, from memory:
1. Tap piece at original location
2. Tap piece at destination
3. Piece animation commences
4. Piece animation finishes
5. Move sound occurs
Everything was smooth except there was an approximately half second delay (may have been less) between 2 and 3.
https://github.com/brianch/offline-chess-puzzles/
i.e. just show the piece, not the piece and where to put it?
I was wondering -- how does the point-based rating system work?
The system is based on ELO with the main difference being that the K factor in OffChess is variable, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elo_rating_system
Too late did I notice that there is no share fen button. I use that for harder puzzles when I want to understand why a given solution wouldn't work. Mostly just share to Chessis.
.... As I doubt you thought them all up yourself. You may want to attribute your non-derivative assets.
Other than that, it is working nicely so far.
https://imgz.org/ibGDKfuf/
For that you will have to wait for the next minor update.
Looks cool. On Android the UI seems to extend below the status bar at the top and below the drawer at the bottom of the screen which creates some overlapping though.
It says "stub for offtopicness" but, skimming them, literally all comments are on-topic. Not all substantial ('very nice app', 'whats the tech stack?') but a lot of other comments are a normal amount of substantial and also in there... I don't get it, but note that you can expand that subthread
We've recently had some threads about new product announcements in which the thread quickly fills up with "booster" comments from new accounts or old/dormant accounts that come back to life just to post these comments. The "stub" is a way to hide those comments without penalizing/hiding the main thread and the product it's about.
We were getting some emails and comments suggesting that this was happening here too, so I started trying to address it by moving some comments into the stub, intending to spend more time figuring out which ones were authentic and which ones seemed inorganic, but was slow to get back to it.
I think in this case, most or even all of the comments are actually organic or authentic; people just really love a good chess app!
Sorry for the confusion!
By "booster" comments we just mean comments that are highly positive but low on substance. "Great app!". "Congrats on the launch!". Comments like that are often an indication that a friendship network has been rallied to show public support and create "social proof". But often these kinds of commenters try to get clever and add in Dorothy Dixer questions about the tech stack or something else to make the comment seem more authentic and substantive, and enable more details to be shared.
Often when that happens, it's green (new) accounts or old/dormant accounts posting the comments and upvoting the thread, but there wasn't much of that here (though there was a little, which is what aroused suspicion).
But these comments don't have any effect on the thread's ranking. It's only a vibes effect.
``` Hi ,Congrats on the launch. I built a free iOS app also which has chess puzzles.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/knighty-chess-puzzles/id674524...
Would appreciate feedback. ```
Not sure if that's why it was moved to `stub for off topicness`. I wonder if it is some kind of categorisation logic based on text.
As for that specific comment, to be fair, I could actually understand: promoting your own product in someone else's thread without really saying anything at all about the submission (topic) that was posted could be seen as off-topic. I don't really mind it (I don't think I voted on it), but I could see a human also classify it that way
Apart from that i have a theory that there is a lot of ML based ranking and classification that is happening at the backend.
There are other comments which are clearly on-topic, e.g. direct feedback about the app, which have been relegated to this weird sub-thread.
If this is a new feature, I’m not a fan of it. We have downvotes for off-topicness.
I built a free iOS app also which has chess puzzles.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/knighty-chess-puzzles/id674524...
Would appreciate feedback.