Soft Chess - Chess Puzzles

Chess puzzles, on boards that are not always eight by eight.

A board here might be four squares across. It might be a triangle, or have a bite taken out of the middle. The pieces move the way they always have - a rook is stopped by the edge of the board, and a hole in it is an edge - so there is nothing new to learn before the first puzzle, and everything to work out once you are in it.

100 puzzles, every one machine-checked by the same engine the game plays with. A mate in one that has no mate is worse than no puzzle at all, so none of them ship until they solve. The ladder is mate in one, then mate in two, then mate in three - the boards do not grow, the puzzles do. The hardest level in the game sits on one of the smallest boards.

OPEN AND PLAY

No splash screen, no menu, no "continue?". The app opens on a board you can move a piece on. Finishing a level changes the board over where it stands rather than sending you back to a map you did not ask for.

SIX PATHS AND SIX BOSSES

The levels climb a trail in six categories - pawn, knight, bishop, rook, queen, king. Clearing a category puts its boss on offer: a timed fight of five to eight puzzles, three lives, no hints and no retries. Beat it and the next path opens, along with the piece set it pays out.

WARM-UP AND SPRINT

Two daily runs, both composed on the spot rather than drawn from a list, so no two are the same puzzle twice. The warm-up is a streak against three mistakes, and it hands your misses back at the end for a free second look. The sprint is as many as you can find in one minute.

BUILT SOFT

Rounded blocks that give under a piece landing on them. Pieces that lean while you hold them. A board you turn with two fingers, and that turns slowly by itself when you leave it alone. Five colour schemes, light and dark, and six piece sets you earn by playing.

If a piece is yours, it is one colour. If it is not, it is the other. That is the whole of what you have to read.

LEARN

A tutorial that teaches on the real board rather than on a diagram of one - the same blocks, the same markers, the same camera. It never opens itself, and it never lists a piece's moves at you: it hands you a position and lets you pick the piece up.

SIX LANGUAGES

English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese. The game follows your phone unless you tell it otherwise.

NO ACCOUNT, PLAYS OFFLINE

There is no sign-in, and nothing to buy. Your progress is a file on your phone. The game sends anonymous usage statistics to help fix what is broken - no name, no email, no advertising ID - and there is one switch in Settings that turns it off for good.

Support: softchess@multitools.ovh