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.
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I'm the developer of rdx, a mildly popular ad-free, privacy and user friendly Reddit client. This time, I made something for a very specific use case: solving chess puzzles with no internet.
Why? Well, my Wi-Fi is terrible in the bathroom—and that's where I do some of my best thinking. I tried printing out “mate in X” puzzles to solve offline, but they weren’t fun without interaction. So I built OffChess.
OffChess is an iPhone/Android app that contains over 100,000 chess puzzles, fully offline and completely ad-free. You can solve puzzles by category (Mate in 1/2/3/4/5, tactics like pins/forks/skewers, or openings like Sicilian/French, etc). You gain or lose points based on how you perform, so there's a light rating system to keep things engaging.
No accounts, no tracking, no monthly subscriptions, no internet required. Just pure, old-school tactical chess training, wherever you are.
You can check out the iPhone/iPad app at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chess-puzzles-offchess/id67447... or the Android app at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.offchess
Would love feedback, bug reports, or suggestions.
Thanks!
Other than that, it is working nicely so far.
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.
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 built a free iOS app also which has chess puzzles.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/knighty-chess-puzzles/id674524...
Would appreciate feedback.
Overall great app.
- 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
- it plays sound even when my (iOS) device is muted
- would love an option to automatically go to next puzzle
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
...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
``` 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.
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.
https://raymondsmullyan.com/books/the-chess-mysteries-of-the...
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)
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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!
See chessbook for an app that does this really well.
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://apps.apple.com/us/app/chess-puzzles-world-champions/...
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)
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 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
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
For that you will have to wait for the next minor update.