Comparison

Chess vs Chess Puzzles

Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.

Head to head
About

Chess

Enhance your chess skills with over 1400 tactical exercises designed for beginners. This app offers interactive lessons, hints, and explanations to help you learn new combinations and improve your game.

Highlights
  • Over 1400 tactical exercises
  • Interactive lessons with hints
  • Difficulty levels
  • Refutation of mistakes
  • Play positions against computer
  • Offline play
  • Rating monitoring
Features
Read full description

If you are a beginner, you just cannot afford to give away your piece in 1 move, presuming, of course, that you wish to improve your play! Another thing you cannot afford is to miss a chance of grabbing an undefended piece of your opponent's! This course includes more than 1400 exercises with a few pieces on the board. Such a great number of exercises makes this course an excellent tool for quick training of chess beginners. The course is intended for players who are already acquainted with the rules of the game. Even if you study and solve only 20% of exercises you are sure to improve your chess skills and not to miss a chance to take an undefended piece in your practical game! All the exercises are taken from practical games and arranged according to the names of pieces and difficulty levels. 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. Part 1 1.1. Winning a knight 1.2. Winning a bishop 1.3. Winning a rook 1.4. Winning a queen 2. Part 2. Win a piece 2.1. Level 1 2.2. Level 2 2.3. Level 3 2.4. Level 4

About

Chess Puzzles

Master chess tactics with over 5 million puzzles from real games, personalized to your skill level. Understand mistakes, practice specific patterns, and track your progress to improve your rating and play better chess.

Highlights
  • Millions of real game puzzles
  • Personalized difficulty levels
  • Mistake analysis and learning
  • Practice 64 tactical motifs
  • Progress tracking (rating, accuracy)
  • Composed chess problems
Features
Read full description

Turn every puzzle into progress. Train with 5M+ puzzles from real games, personalized to your level. When you make a mistake, understand why - and learn from it. That’s the idea we built this app around. Solving more puzzles is useful, but we wanted training to be about more than getting a position right or wrong. We wanted every puzzle to teach you something - about the move you missed, the pattern you didn’t recognize, or the way you calculated the position. There are more than 5 million puzzles from real games. But the number itself isn’t really the point. What matters is finding the right positions for you, at the right difficulty, and helping you learn from them. When you make a mistake, you can understand why. Use hints, explore better moves, get coaching, and look deeper into the position instead of simply moving on to the next puzzle. Over time, your training starts to reveal which tactical patterns give you the most trouble. You can practice across 64 motifs and patterns - forks, pins, sacrifices, checkmates, endgames, and many more - and spend more time on the ideas that need it. You can also see how your training develops over time: your rating, accuracy, training time, and performance across different patterns. And when you’re ready for something truly advanced, there are more than 300,000 composed chess problems from solving competitions. They’re difficult, precise, often beautiful - and solving them can be one of the most satisfying forms of chess training. We’ve also tried to make this a place you’ll actually want to come back to. Solve a few puzzles when you have five minutes. Sit down for a longer session when you feel like training seriously. Build a streak, reach a milestone, or simply keep showing up. Whether you’re new to tactics or have been playing chess for years, the goal stays the same: Learn something from every puzzle. Play better chess. And we’re here to help you along the way. Privacy Policy: https://chess.phd/privacy/ Terms of Use: https://chess.phd/terms/

Screenshots

Chess4 screens
Chess Puzzles4 screens

Verdict

The call

The clearest difference is update cadence: Chess Puzzles at every 3 days against Chess's every 6 weeks. Chess Puzzles also leads on ratings volume (258 vs 27). Chess's advantage is review sentiment (100% vs 87%) and device support (3 vs 1). On price, rating, ads and in-app purchases 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

CostPrice · In-app purchases · Ads · Monetization

Both are free to download. Chess sells 1 one-off in-app purchase and Chess Puzzles sells 8 in-app purchases, starting at $3.99 per 7 days. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.

ReceptionRating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings

On the App Store both sit at effectively the same score — 4.7 for Chess against 4.8 for Chess Puzzles. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Chess Puzzles has 258 ratings behind it against 27, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews are what separate them: 100% of Chess's written reviews are positive against 87% of Chess Puzzles's.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Chess ships an update every 6 weeks, Chess Puzzles every 3 days. The most recent releases landed on November 4, 2026 and November 13, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard5 real differences · 5 level
Chess versus Chess Puzzles: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterChessChess Puzzles
PriceFreeFree
Rating4.7 (27 ratings)4.8 (258 ratings) — better
Positive reviews100.0% of reviews — better87.0% of reviews
Number of ratings27258 — better
Update frequencyEvery 6 weeksEvery 3 days — better
AdsNoNo
In-app purchasesYesYes
MonetizationFree with in-app purchasesFreemium
DevicesiPhone, iPad, iPod — betteriPhone
Requires iOS8.0 — better18.0
Further details — not scored
Size42 MB114 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperChess KingSergei Tovmasian

Customer experience

Chess

All ratings27 ratings
Positive92.6%
Neutral3.7%
Negative3.7%
Written reviews4 reviews
Positive100.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative0.0%

Chess Puzzles

All ratings255 ratings
Positive97.3%
Neutral1.2%
Negative1.6%
Written reviews23 reviews
Positive87.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative13.0%

In-app purchases

1 purchases

Chess

One-time1
  • Full course$3.99
8 purchases

Chess Puzzles

Subscriptions8
  • Premium Weekly3 Days trial$3.997 Days
  • Chess.PhD Premium (1 Week)$4.997 Days
  • Premium Weekly2 variants$4.997 Days
Show 5 more
  • Chess.PhD Weekly Premium3 Days trial$4.997 Days
  • Premium Monthly2 variants$9.991 Month
  • Chess.PhD Premium (1 Year)7 Days trial$49.991 Year
  • Chess.PhD Premium (1 Year)3 Days trial$49.991 Year
  • Premium Annual3 Days trial$49.991 Year

Questions

Is Chess free?
Chess is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Is Chess Puzzles free?
Chess Puzzles is free to download, with in-app purchases available.
Which has better reviews, Chess or Chess Puzzles?
Chess Puzzles is rated higher. Chess averages 4.7 out of 5 from 27 ratings, while Chess Puzzles averages 4.8 from 258 ratings.
Do Chess or Chess Puzzles have ads?
Neither Chess nor Chess Puzzles shows ads.
Which is updated more often, Chess or Chess Puzzles?
Chess ships an update every 6 weeks, and Chess Puzzles every 3 days. Most recently, Chess was updated on November 4, 2026 and Chess Puzzles on November 13, 2026.

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