Chess vs Hexpawn
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Chess
Master defensive chess skills with over 3000 interactive exercises. This app acts as a personal coach, providing hints and explanations to improve your game. It's designed for beginners to consolidate fundamental defensive tactics.
- Over 3000 defensive exercises
- Interactive coach with hints and explanations
- Improve defensive tactics
- Track ELO rating changes
- Offline play capability
- Play positions against computer
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If you are a beginner, you just have to learn how to defend your pieces from being taken! Every chessplayer has to master and consolidate some basic defensive skills such as withdrawing or protecting a piece, interception or attacking an opponent's piece. Having consolidated your knowledge by doing a great number of exercises you will be able to improve your level of playing. This course includes more than 3000 exercises with lots of pieces on the board. Such a great number of exercises makes this course an excellent tool for quick training of chess beginners. This course is in the series Chess King Learn (https://learn.chessking.com/), which is an unprecedented chess teaching method. In the series are included courses in tactics, strategy, openings, middle game, and endgame, split by levels from beginners to experienced players, and even professional players. With the help of this course, you can improve your chess knowledge, learn new tactical tricks and combinations, and consolidate the acquired knowledge into practice. The program acts as a coach who gives tasks to solve and helps to solve them if you get stuck. It will give you hints, explanations and show you even striking refutation of the mistakes you might make. Advantages of the program: • High quality examples, all double-checked for correctness • You need to enter all key moves, required by the teacher • Different levels of complexity of the tasks • Various goals, which need to be reached in the problems • The program gives hint if an error is made • For typical mistaken moves, the refutation is shown • You can play out any position of the tasks against the computer • Interactive theoretical lessons • Structured table of contents • The program monitors the change in the rating (ELO) of the player during the learning process • Test mode with flexible settings • Possibility to bookmark favorite exercises • The application is adapted to the bigger screen of a tablet • The application does not require an internet connection The course includes a free part, in which you can test the program. Lessons offered in the free version is fully functional. They allow you to test the application in real world conditions before releasing the following topics: 1. Retreat 1.1. Defend your knight 1.2. Defend your bishop 1.3. Defend your rook 1.4. Defend your queen 2. Defending with another piece 2.1. Defend your knight 2.2. Defend your bishop 2.3. Defend your rook 3. Taking an attacking piece 3.1. Defend your knight 3.2. Defend your bishop 3.3. Defend your rook 3.4. Defend your queen 4. Interception 4.1. Defend your rook 4.2. Defend your queen 5. Defending from mate 5.1. Level 4 5.2. Level 5 5.3. Level 6 5.4. Level 7 5.5. Level 8 5.6. Level 9 5.7. Level 10 5.8. Level 11 5.9. Level 12 6. Difficulty level 6.1. Level 1 6.2. Level 2 6.3. Level 3 6.4. Level 4 6.5. Level 5 6.6. Level 6 6.7. Level 7 6.8. Level 8 6.9. Level 9 6.10. Level 10 6.11. Level 11 6.12. Level 12
Hexpawn
This game features a chess AI that learns from every game you play. It starts with minimal knowledge but improves with each win, making it increasingly challenging. Experience a unique take on machine learning through strategic gameplay.
- Adaptive AI opponent
- Learns from player wins
- Increasing difficulty
- Simple pawn-only moves
- Machine learning demonstration
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Think you're smarter than a mindless iPhone app? Think again! HEXPAWN is just that: a computer that fits in your pocket and knows almost nothing. What does it know? Only the moves a pawn can make in chess. Oh yeah, and one other thing. Like the proverbial elephant or your seventh grade algebra teacher, it never forgets. So play HEXPAWN. You'll probably win the first few games. But every time you win, HEXPAWN remembers. And it will never make the same mistake twice... which means eventually, HEXPAWN will be impossible to defeat. Don't believe me? Go ahead. Try. See how long you can last against this brainless robot. I bet it won't be long. Enjoy this small dip into the world of machine learning and the eventual domination of the human race at the hands of our machine overlords.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Hexpawn at none against Chess's 1. Hexpawn also leads on update cadence (every 3 days vs every 4 months) and review sentiment (100% vs 88%). Chess's advantage is ratings volume (60 vs 8) and iOS requirement (8.0 vs 10.1). On price, rating, ads and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Chess sells 1 one-off in-app purchase. Hexpawn asks for nothing beyond the download.
On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 4.6 for Chess against 4.5 for Hexpawn. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Chess has 60 ratings behind it against 8, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews are what separate them: 88% of Chess's written reviews are positive against 100% of Hexpawn's.
Chess ships an update every 4 months, Hexpawn every 3 days. The most recent releases landed on November 6, 2026 and November 2, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Chess | Hexpawn |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.6 (60 ratings) — better | 4.5 (8 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 87.5% of reviews | 100.0% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 60 — better | 8 |
| Update frequency | Every 4 months | Every 3 days — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | No — better |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Free — better |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPod |
| Requires iOS | 8.0 — better | 10.1 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 42 MB | 38 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | Chess King | Garrett Milovich |
Customer experience
Chess
Hexpawn
In-app purchases
Chess
- Full course$3.99
Hexpawn
No in-app purchases









