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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Nice project!
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.
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.
TacticMaster on F Droid seems to have all the same features for free.
A great app no doubt but the descriptive hints on OffChess and a different rating system set OffChess apart from TacticMaster.
To be fair you shouldn't be sitting in the bathroom for that long because you'll develop hemorrhoids.
Nice! Quick feedback:
- it plays sound even when my (iOS) device is muted
- would love an option to automatically go to next puzzle
I have TacticMaster (available on F-droid) but your app looks more polished and will have to give it a try as well.
Neat, just downloaded it off of fdroid. Really cool, thank you!
Nice app and props to you for open sourcing it, thanks for your good words about OffChess.
Not my app, just a user, credit goes to this person https://github.com/jazzm0
Love it! The notification bar on my OnePlus 13 blocks access to the triple dot settings button on the top of my screen. ither than that it's clean.
That's been fixed and the update - as soon as it is approved by Google should be available on play store.
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.
That’s more of a feature request not a bug report
Are you going to make a desktop client?
I wonder where were those 100k puzzles sourced from?
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.
Great start! Gentle feedback:
- 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”
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.
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.
Other than that, it is working nicely so far.
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.
Update: I have fixed the issue, the update will be available as soon as Google approves it.
Same here, there's some text at the top that's below my clock and icons:
https://imgz.org/ibGDKfuf/
That's not supposed to happen, there should be space left for a status bar and a navigation bar. Can you share the make and model of your device?
Reporting same bug, on Google Pixel 8.
Yes, it's a Nothing 2.
Cool app. I’ve been thinking of building a similar PWA for a while now, might actually do that.
Even I thought of first making it a PWA too, the only problem is storage of the puzzles database.
In my experience, nothing beats the puzzle quality of ChessTempo. Curious how this compares to that.
Congrats on the launch!
I was wondering -- how does the point-based rating system work?
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.
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
I can't select the settings button on my Pixel 8 :|
I am so sorry about your experience, will be fixed by tomorrow if Google approves the update soon.
Where did you get the puzzles from?
If it were my Chess app, I'd get them from the Lichess open database (currently at 5M puzzles): https://database.lichess.org/#puzzles
So did I.
I have an iPhone 16 Pro and there is an annoying delay between tapping a move and the piece moving
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.
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.
Share fen and share pgn buttons will be added in the next update.
This alternative: https://github.com/brianch/offline-chess-puzzles is linked from lichess puzzle page.
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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.
[delayed]
Yes, very strange and I was wondering why my comment which is on topic was added here…
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.
Solo developer, no ads, no subscription. Take my money! And thanks for writing decent software.
Can you tell us about the tech stack you used and why?
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.
Overall great app.
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.
Love the app! Would love it twice as much if you allowed me to turn off the sounds (it turns off any existing podcasts or music).
Thanks for the review, will add a toggle in the next update.
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.
Nice app, I dig the logo.
Thanks man. I would also suggest creating a leaderboard with XP for gamification
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.
This is cool! Is there a chess board library that you used or did you have to built it from scratch?
I built the board from scratch but used the awesome chess.js library by Jeff Hlywa for move validation.
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.
Awesome. I’ve never understood why Lichess limits the offline download to 50 puzzles.
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
It’s not worth much when I want to use the Lichess app on an eight hour plane ride to solve them :)
I like the feature because it updates my rank when I get internet restored. I just wish they cached more than 50 offline.
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.
Try lichess' beta app, it's much more user friendly, even if it's missing a couple of features.
Thanks for your generous reply and Oh my god how did I miss that, will fix in the next update.
Thank you and God bless you my friend :)
Very nice! but why not a webapp as well (for those of us who seldom use their phone and can get bored at the office)?
OffChess website will be soon available in beta with multiple features.
Very cool!
Nice. Any retrograde chess puzzles with this?
Not yet but interesting idea, I might add these as a category in the future.
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Swift, Java, Javascript, Sqlite etc.
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