CheSScan

Alok Nagdev

Contains ads

About this app

CheSScan is a chess utility designed to help chess coaches and chess players in their coaching and training work respectively. Two key features of CheSScan are chessboard position (FEN) scanning and tournament scoresheet (PGN) scanning. FEN or board position scanning assumes standard chess variant. For scoresheet scanning, tournament scoresheets have to be written in Standard Algebraic Notation (SAN). Games can be saved as a Portable Game Notation (PGN) file on the device storage.

As of current version, following features are supported by CheSScan:

- FEN scanning - scans a board position from a computer screen or from a chess book
- Lets users edit a chess board to setup a position for analysis
- Scoresheet scanning - scans chess tournament scoresheet
- Lets users correct misidentified moves to build corrected game PGN
- Writing Game PGN - store scanned games as PGN on device
- Analysis - lets users do analysis of games in the database with a very strong chess engine
- Sharing Games - allows users to share their games PGN via email with fellow chess players or trainers

CheSScan is intended to assist its users in not wasting time in entering chess positions or tournament game moves manually and getting down to more productive task of analyzing one's games. In line with aforementioned intention CheSScan provides a very powerful chess engine (Arasan) to analyze scanned board positions or scanned tournament games quickly. Your games are stored on your device as a PGN file which can be shared via email.

Subscriptions

For users wanting to use the ad free premium service, three different subscription plans are on sale:
- CheSScan Pro Opening - $0.99 / month
- CheSScan Pro Middlegame - $2.49 / 3 months
- CheSScan Pro Endgame - $3.99 / 6 months

Once subscribed, subscriptions will automatically renew unless canceled at least 24 hours before the end of the current period. Purchase will be applied to your Play Store account for renewal within 24 hours before the end of your current period. You can cancel your subscription anytime by going to your Play Store account settings.

Users who choose non-subscription based use of the service, for them, while the key functionality to save the game is not available, users can still:

- Scan board and analyze chess positions
- Edit board to setup chess positions
- Scan tournament scoresheets, correct moves and analyze games

For more information please visit https://chesscan.com/#terms and https://chesscan.com/#privacy.

CheSScan aims to be able to "scan" with high level of accuracy. However, at this point it is not quite there and is limited in following aspects:

- There are myriads of different chess pieces of differing styles, a lot of which CheSScan might not be able to recognize.
- It is your responsibility to make sure that the position you enter on the editable board is legal position for analysis.
- CheSScan cannot recognize cursive handwriting. So, your moves letters/characters should be distinctly legible.
- Moves should not be overlapping or obstructed by scoresheet layout. Move characters should not cross over any of the scoresheet layout lines.
- A handwriting that is not legible to humans would most likely be impossible for an OCR to understand.
- Scoresheet should be as clean as possible, and should not contain unused or crossed out move lines or move boxes.
- A crumpled, marred or unclean scoresheet would be extremely hard for recognizer to work on, and most likely would return without having recognized any moves.

Ratings and reviews

It's a good idea and a much necessary app. But unfortunately, it didn't work on my phone. I take the photo of the score sheet and the app immediately minimises. If i open the app, I see that the app has taken the photo, and is displayed in the bottom left circle, but i am unable to do anything with it. If i click it, i get a ' complete action using' dialog box with fileamanager n gallery as options, what do i do with that? PS - Hi, have sent you an email with screen recording of the problem

I downloaded this app, so I could scan my chess scorebook, yet after I grant the app camera acces, it's stuck on a white screen.

This doesn't feel like a finished app. The accuracy of the scanning is so-so but I understand that's a hard problem. Other than that the menu is undiscoverable (swipe from the left edge), it's missing the save button so the only way to get the PGN out of the app is to email it.

What's new

This release of CheSScan extends support from Android 9 (Pie) and above, up to Android 14. Devices with Android versions lower than Android 9 would not be able to install this new version.