ChessCraft

Frame of Mind

In-app purchases

About this game

Never play the same game of chess again! ChessCraft is a chess sandbox with an AI computer opponent. Customize chess boards, rules, and pieces. Share your creations online. Play your friends online, or play the computer, or choose from one of 75 built-in chess boards in adventure mode. ChessCraft is also the world's largest chess variant database.

https://www.chesscraft.ca

Many chess AI mobile games already exist, but only ChessCraft allows the player to create such wacky boards and pieces and immediately play a decent computer opponent.

Create new pieces with any combination of the 8 bishop or rook slides, plus a 7x7 grid of knight-like hops. Pieces can also enhance or restrict nearby pieces. Create new boards with any enabled or disabled tile up to 16x16. Place promotion rules for any piece, anywhere. Place tile rules like witch windows (teleporters), sanctuaries, and more. The computer AI opponent then uses concepts from computer science and graph theory to understand your creations and play against you.

When you share a board, your friends can play the AI too. Sharing creates a new web page just for you, like this:

https://www.chesscraft.ca/design?id=shape-variant1

ChessCraft is full and free with no ads, except for the occasional popup which asks you to buy ChessCraft Patron. If you become a patron, you won't see those interruptions anymore. If you're a teacher, student, or you cannot afford ChessCraft Patron, send me an email and I'll send you a special code.

Visit the website and send me an email if you have any feedback or questions. If you like the game, please rate it!

Ratings and reviews

Great game. So far I've only played adventure, but it's pretty fun already. There are a few typos in some of the descriptions, but the reason I didn't give 5 stars was because of 2 things. First, I believe there is a wrong piece in front of the black tree in neebling (doe not lion). Second, I was trying to get the 2 seconds per turn badge and realized that it's basically impossible for levels 3 and 4 because they take a while to make a move and the timer seems to count their time.

Frankly the movement options are pretty limited. The piece creation doesn't allow for forced hopping pieces, think checkers, and anything more complex than rook or bishop movement is always treated as a 'jump' like a knight. Adventure mode is grindy, forcing you to replay levels on higher difficulties to get enough points to unlock all of the levels in the first place. In general, it's okay. If you wanted to recreate even basic fairy chess puzzles, than you won't find it here.

So far, this app is everything I have been looking for. I was able to create a game that has dragons, rogues, and multiple other pieces with different abilities. The creativity you can have here is almost endless, with different faces you can use for each piece. You even have the ability to create your own board. I can't say anymore only because it would be wrong of me to ruin the surprise for every 1. I'll change to five stars once I have played around with the app more than a couple of hours.

What’s new

Bug fixes.
User interface improvements.
Fixed ghost appearance.
Added graphics for special days.