Apps for Free

Category(s): Games, Puzzle, Education, Board

Average User Rating: 2.5

Number of Users Rating: 86

Current Version's Average User Rating: 4.5

Current Version's Number of Users Rating: 9

Description: *** 180,000 users!! ***

Chess-wise is a chess playing app for the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad. It contains many nice features not found in any other chess program, like having an interface to the 6-men tablebase of Nalimov, and containing a large database of professional games.

A lot of attention has been paid to the graphics, with the aim to make it look beautiful, without any distracting bling-bling. All moves are animated. Captured pieced fade away. You can choose from 20 different sets of pieces.

Chess-wise has VoiceOver integration, making it the only mobile chess application which is fully accessible to blind users (iOS 4 required).

PLAY

Games can be either for 1 or 2 players, and either with or without a clock. When playing without a clock in landscape mode, the view is 3 dimensional. Of course, all the standard features like swapping sides or rotating the board are available.

ANALYZE

Chess-wise contains a separate screen for analyzing positions. You can try out side variations and return to the main line with a simple double tap on the corresponding move in the move list. You can ask the engine for an evaluation, or look up the ECO code for a position.

SETUP

You can setup a position using an intuitive interface.

TABLEBASE

And as long as there are no more than 6 pieces on the board, the exact evaluation is shown below the board. A really unique feature!

REPLAY

Look through the game you just played, and email the game notation, or copy it to the clipboard.

DATABASE

Chess-wise contains a large database with over 78000 games from over 700 tournaments, and a PGN viewer to play through these games.

ONLINE SEARCH

Another unique feature is online search in a database with 3.5 million games. Search by player name and ECO code. How are the grandmasters handling your favorite openings?

EXERCISES

Finally, there is a collection of 300 exercises which keeps track of which ones you've solved.

Each of these features alone is worth the price of Chess-wise! And regular updates expand the possibilities of Chess-wise even more.

Chess-wise is based on the Tjes engine (developed by me in 1996), and has played on the Internet Chess Club (ICC). The engine contains:
- an opening book
- ECO classification
Some more technical details:
- bitboard representation
- alpha/beta search with a search window
- partial move ordering
- 2 killer moves are searched first
- an extra ply after forced moves
- transposition tables (including a pawn hash)

In one of the next versions interfaces to the many online chess servers will be included.

This FREE version is limited in six ways:
- The hash tables are turned off.
- It contains three of the 20 pieces fonts.
- It contains the games of only six tournaments and two world championships.
- The online search results are limited to the top one.
- The 6-men tablebase is restricted to 4 pieces.
- The exercises are limited to 10.
Otherwise, the app is identical to the PRO version.

Enjoy!