Mobialia Chess (Ads)

mobialia.com

Contains ads

About this game

This is the Free version of Mobialia Chess, the most complete chess app for Android

Play against AI

- Selectable ELO Levels to adjust playing strength, from 500 to 2100, on 50 ELO points steps
- Selectable time per move: changing the ELO and the time per move, lots of difficulty levels can be selected
- Opening book with more than 30.000 positions: ensures variated funny games
- Can undo/redo all moves
- Send PGN by email: This way, you can analyze later your games on your PC
- Graphical setup board, also can edit position’s FEN notation
- On closing, saves the current game and it is loaded when the application is restarted

Play online

- Play online at freechess.org (FICS) or chessclub.com (ICC)
- Play as guest or as a registered user
- Seek/offer match rated and unrated
- View seeks posted by other users. Can sort seek list by username, rating or game time
- Takeback, draw, abort, resign and rematch options while playing
- Play, Finger and Observe, can also observe LectureBot on FICS or play ProblemBot/TrainingBot on ICC
- Observe current played games in the chess server or follow highest rated games
- Messages: read and send messages to other users
- Game History: you can examine or send by email all your played games
- Console to see server output and to send commands, also for chatting with other users
- Timeseal (FICS) and Timestamp (ICC): avoids lag problems
- Premove option: You can introduce the next movement in your opponent’s turn
- Option to confirm the move before sending it to the server. Forward and Backward buttons are converted on Confirm/Cancel buttons
- Supports wild chess variants: Atomic, Losers, Suicide and Chess960

Chess problems

- 2900+ chess problems to solve looking for the best moves: problems collected by Uwe Auerswald, from Germany
- Selectable problem difficult (Easy, Medium and Hard Problems)

Chess database

- Chess database of ~3.1M games updated weekly from http://www.theweekinchess.com
- It allows to search for players, events and dates from the section Database in the main sidebar
- It can search specific positions from the board with ⋮-> Search position in DB
- Searching a board position shows stats including, for each move, the number of games where the move was played and the white victory/draw/black victory percentages as bars
- From the stats screen you can list all the games in the current position with ⋮-> Show games

PGN browser

- Simple PGN browser, allows you to open PGN files from SD card or from your email

Analysis

- Analyis mode in the board screens with ⋮-> Analysis
- It shows the position's ECO code

A great interface

- 2D/3D board
- Clean, simple and intuitive interface
- Move by dragging and dropping the piece with useful guide lines
- Also move by tapping the origin and the destiny squares or with the trackball
- Portrait and landscape mode
- Shows legal moves (as yellow translucent squares)
- Highlights last move (with a yellow arrow or a colored square, can be configured with a settings option), also move hints (as a green arrow) after a request in the menu
- Many piece sets and board styles
- Shows a dot in the side to move and can show board coordinates
- The material gauge indicates the material advantage using this piece values: Pawn=1 Knight=3 Bishop=3 Rook=5 Queen=9. Click on the gauge to show/hide the captured pieces difference
- Shows captured pieces advantage (as an example if black captured 3 pawns and whites 2, it shows an advantage of 1 white pawn for blacks)
- Speaks moves, checks and game results
- Different sounds for moves, captures and checks, also vibration
- Option to keep the screen on while playing

Ratings and reviews

Great app, the only chess app I know for Android that's usable. Unfortunately it appears to only use a single locking thread for network and interaction, because in fast play the UI is often not repspnsive when the app seems to be waiting on its network socket. That makes fast lightning style games very hard to play. It would be flawless if it wasn't for that.

New issue - Banner adds pop in, different sizes, shifting board up or down during play, to accommodate differing banner sizes. This results in dropping a piece on the wrong square, when timing is bad for new add, which has cost me two games now. Considering this unplayable at that rate.

It's a great online chess app but there is a bug that's bugging me. Occasionally (randomly) I get disconnected from the server even when I have exceptional 5g. That, ultimately, has cost me a few games. An update would be good, since the last one was Oct 2020.

What's new

Version 5.5.1: Online tactics
- Integrated tactics from 12chess.com (You can still use the old offline problems from the settings)
- Updated to Stockfish 16
- Added a new icon
- Due to new Android policies, the permission to write to external storage has been removed and not it uses the Storage Access Framework
- Consequently, the option to save all online played games to a PGN file had to be removed
- Upgraded libraries and SDKs