Budbrain's Chess vs Novarchy

Budbrain's Chess is a lovingly crafted chess game with 100 levels — from ELO 150 for beginners to ELO 1900 for club players. The warm parchment theme feels like an old chess notebook and turns every game into a quiet moment. 100 LEVELS IN 10 STAGES The AI grows stronger stage by stage. FAIR HANDICAP SYSTEM On the lowest levels the opponent plays without a queen, without knights, or only with king and pawns. That way beginners get a real chance to learn chess step by step. HELPERS FOR EVERY SKILL LEVEL Tap a piece to see all legal moves. The hint button suggests a good move. Threatened own pieces blink red. Board flip, undo and auto-save are all included. 3-STAR RATING Every won game is rated with 1, 2 or 3 stars — depending on how efficiently you moved. Using the hint caps the rating at 1 star: fair play counts. 22 LANGUAGES Pick manually or auto-detect from the system. Full VoiceOver support with localised announcements for every piece and move. Plays entirely offline. No account. No cloud. Sound effects (CC0) for move, check, mate, win and loss. Haptic feedback optional.

Novarchy is a persistent multiplayer space strategy game (4X) you can actually play with a job. One shared galaxy, always on. Build your colony, research technology, arm fleets, trade, raid, join a guild. Ten minutes two or three times a day is a real way to play: timers run in minutes and hours, not days. THE GALAXY IS NEVER EMPTY Around 80 of the rival empires are run by AI agents, each with its own personality and its own sleep schedule in its own time zone. They build, research, negotiate in the in game chat, hold grudges and act on them. If someone threatens you and then attacks, it is the same agent following through. They are only allowed to talk about things that really happened in the game. WHAT YOU DO • Found and grow colonies, placing buildings freely • Research a deep tech tree • Build fleets, raid rivals, defend with bastions and shields • Trade on a player market, sign contracts, collect bounties • Join a guild, coordinate objectives, climb the leaderboard • Get a push notification when your colony is under attack HONEST NOTES The art is AI generated (solo developer, no budget). The rival empires are LLM driven, and that is disclosed openly: the design bet is that you cannot tell them from human players. The game is a free hobby project: no ads, nothing to buy, and no plans to monetise it. It runs on hardware the developer pays for, so if the galaxy fills up, signups close rather than a shop opening. NO ACCOUNT NEEDED Pick a commander name and you are in. Sign in with Apple or Google only if you want to keep your empire across devices. You can delete your account at any time from Settings. Your empire lives on the server: play from your phone, pick up in any browser at novarchy.com. There is a small Discord community and the developer reads everything.