Chess Coach: Puzzles

Chess Coach: Puzzles is a tactics trainer with 100,000 real puzzles, and it runs entirely on your phone.

Every puzzle is a position from a real game. The opponent plays their move, and then it is your turn to find the line that works. Play the right move and the board confirms it, move by move, until the puzzle is done. Play the wrong one and you see it straight away, and the puzzle goes on your review list so it comes back later.

Puzzles that match your level

You answer one question when you start: how much chess have you played? From there your rating does the work. Solve a puzzle above your level and it jumps, miss an easy one and it drops, and the puzzles you get come from the rating band your own rating sits in. The 100,000 puzzles run from 600 all the way past 2200, so the app keeps up whether you are learning what a fork is or hunting for a quiet move.

Train the motif you keep missing

29 practice themes, in the four groups the app itself uses:

Mates and king attacks: mate, back-rank mate, double check, kingside attack, queenside attack, exposed king
Tactics: fork, pin, skewer, discovered attack, discovered check, deflection, attraction, sacrifice, clearance, in-between move, capture the defender, hanging piece, trapped piece, quiet move, defensive move, zugzwang
Pawn play: advanced pawn, promotion
Endgames: rook endgame, pawn endgame, bishop endgame, knight endgame, queen endgame

Pick one and drill it until it stops surprising you.

A daily puzzle

One puzzle a day, the same one for everyone. Every day you train counts towards a day streak, and only missing a whole day breaks it.

Stats that tell you something

Your rating over time, how many puzzles you solved and how many you got right, how long you take to solve, your best streaks and records, and your accuracy per motif. That last one is the useful one: it shows you in a glance that your pins are fine and your deflections are not.

Designed to be calm

Seven board palettes and three piece sets. Light and dark themes. Board coordinates, a sharp vector board at any screen density, and wooden move sounds you can mute. 14 languages, including Hindi, Persian, Vietnamese, Indonesian and Chinese.

Built for your phone, not for our servers

All 100,000 puzzles are inside the app. No account, no sign-in, no sync, and nothing to load. On a plane, on the metro, on a phone with the data switched off, it works exactly the same. Your rating, your stats and your solving history stay on your device, because there is no server of ours for them to go to. The only data that goes anywhere is what is needed to show ads, with a clear EU consent prompt where the law requires one.

Free to play with a set of kings, which are your training lives. A wrong move costs one, they refill by themselves, and you can watch an optional ad for a refill or unlock unlimited play with a single purchase.

Ten minutes of tactics a day beats an hour of watching someone else play.