> 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.

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.

To be fair you shouldn't be sitting in the bathroom for that long because you'll develop hemorrhoids.

ChessKing has some stuff availabke only after payment, but has pretty good thematical collections.

I will look into the app you suggested and try to implement premoves.

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.

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

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.

Will have to implement a different billing system for that so it will take some time.

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.

Thank you for your kind words.

OffChess website will be soon available in beta with multiple features.

Probably because lichess.org exists?

The article from the other day for context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44473135

Try lichess' beta app, it's much more user friendly, even if it's missing a couple of features.

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.

Thanks for your generous reply and Oh my god how did I miss that, will fix in the next update.

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)

Have pushed the update, should be visible in a few days on app store.

Thanks for the review, will add a toggle in the next update.

This should work on Macs by default, will look into making one for Windows/linux.

Updates are coming to rdx as well and thanks for your feedback on OffChess, will look into your suggestions definitely.

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.

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.

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.

Even I thought of first making it a PWA too, the only problem is storage of the puzzles database.

There is a nice native app for offline lichess puzzles. Written in rust:

https://github.com/brianch/offline-chess-puzzles/

One day, I hope.

Thanks for your review.

Swift, Java, Javascript, Sqlite etc.

That's been fixed and the update - as soon as it is approved by Google should be available on play store.

Not yet but interesting idea, I might add these as a category in the future.

I built the board from scratch but used the awesome chess.js library by Jeff Hlywa for move validation.

Only available on play store for now :(

If it were my Chess app, I'd get them from the Lichess open database (currently at 5M puzzles): https://database.lichess.org/#puzzles

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 am so sorry about your experience, will be fixed by tomorrow if Google approves the update soon.

Share fen and share pgn buttons will be added in the next update.

Nice app and props to you for open sourcing it, thanks for your good words about OffChess.

Neat, just downloaded it off of fdroid. Really cool, thank you!

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.

That’s more of a feature request not a bug report

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.

Same here, there's some text at the top that's below my clock and icons:

https://imgz.org/ibGDKfuf/

I have fixed the issue, just waiting for Google to approve the app.

Note that the discussion continues in the collapsed comment by tomhow: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44499848

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

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.

In my experience, nothing beats the puzzle quality of ChessTempo. Curious how this compares to that.

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.

This alternative: https://github.com/brianch/offline-chess-puzzles is linked from lichess puzzle page.

[dead]

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.