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 1500 tactical exercises drawn from real games. This app provides hints, explanations, and refutations to help beginners improve their play and learn new combinations. It acts as a personal coach, adapting to your progress and offering interactive lessons.

Highlights
  • Over 1500 tactical exercises
  • Hints and explanations
  • Refutations of mistakes
  • Interactive theoretical lessons
  • Progress monitoring (ELO rating)
  • Offline play
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 1500 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. 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 2.5. Level 5 2.6. Level 6 2.7. Level 7 2.8. Level 8

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 play better chess.

Highlights
  • 5M+ puzzles from real games
  • Personalized difficulty
  • Mistake analysis and learning
  • 64 tactical motifs and patterns
  • Progress tracking (rating, accuracy)
  • 300,000+ 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 rating (4.8 vs 4.5) and ratings volume (249 vs 11). Chess's advantage is review sentiment (100% vs 87%) and device support (3 vs 1). On price, ads, in-app purchases and monetization model 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 9 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

Chess Puzzles holds the better App Store score, 4.8 against 4.5. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Chess Puzzles has 249 ratings behind it against 11, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews complicate that: 100% of Chess's written reviews are positive against 87% of Chess Puzzles's, so the app with the better star average is not the one people write more warmly about.

UpkeepUpdate frequency

Chess ships an update every 6 weeks, Chess Puzzles every 3 days. The most recent releases landed on November 6, 2026 and November 5, 2026 respectively.

Scorecard6 real differences · 4 level
Chess versus Chess Puzzles: the parameters behind the verdict, then further details
ParameterChessChess Puzzles
PriceFreeFree
Rating4.5 (11 ratings)4.8 (249 ratings) — better
Positive reviews100.0% of reviews — better87.0% of reviews
Number of ratings11249 — 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 MB113 MB
Age rating4+4+
DeveloperChess KingSergei Tovmasian

Customer experience

Chess

All ratings11 ratings
Positive81.8%
Neutral9.1%
Negative9.1%
Written reviews3 reviews
Positive100.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative0.0%

Chess Puzzles

All ratings249 ratings
Positive97.6%
Neutral0.8%
Negative1.6%
Written reviews23 reviews
Positive87.0%
Neutral0.0%
Negative13.0%

In-app purchases

1 purchases

Chess

One-time1
  • Full course$3.99
9 purchases

Chess Puzzles

Subscriptions9
  • Premium Weekly3 Days trial$3.997 Days
  • Chess.PhD Premium (1 Week)3 Days trial$4.997 Days
  • Chess.PhD Premium (1 Week)$4.997 Days
Show 6 more
  • Premium Weekly$4.997 Days
  • Chess.PhD Weekly Premium3 Days trial$4.997 Days
  • Premium Monthly2 variants$9.991 Month
  • Premium Annual$29.991 Year
  • Chess.PhD Premium (1 Year)7 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 4.5 out of 5 from 11 ratings, while Chess Puzzles averages 4.8 from 249 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 6, 2026 and Chess Puzzles on November 5, 2026.

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