Hi HN!

I'm the developer of rdx, a mildly popular ad-free, privacy and user friendly Reddit client. This time, I made something for a very specific use case: solving chess puzzles with no internet.

Why? Well, my Wi-Fi is terrible in the bathroom—and that's where I do some of my best thinking. I tried printing out “mate in X” puzzles to solve offline, but they weren’t fun without interaction. So I built OffChess.

OffChess is an iPhone/Android app that contains over 100,000 chess puzzles, fully offline and completely ad-free. You can solve puzzles by category (Mate in 1/2/3/4/5, tactics like pins/forks/skewers, or openings like Sicilian/French, etc). You gain or lose points based on how you perform, so there's a light rating system to keep things engaging.

No accounts, no tracking, no monthly subscriptions, no internet required. Just pure, old-school tactical chess training, wherever you are.

You can check out the iPhone/iPad app at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chess-puzzles-offchess/id67447... or the Android app at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.offchess

Would love feedback, bug reports, or suggestions.

Thanks!

Nice project!

As it was not clear from the description, there's a one-time payment (4.29€) to get more than 7 puzzles in a day.

Lichess also offers a good alternative to this, although their offline support is limited.

Well designed app with a good collection. Have a few feature requests.

* Ability to continue and play solved puzzles till the end by exporting to an external chess app using FEN or PNG

* Bookmark interesting games to come back and maybe solve again (with no points)

Feature request:

It'd be nice to be able go back to a previous puzzle (back button? For me I think I've only wanted one level of "history"), I've occasionally misclicked the next puzzle button when I want to think a little more about why other variations weren't correct.

Another feature that would be nice would be the ability to see my win/loss stats per category so I could know what I should work on. I suspect there are some categories I'm just bad at, but without just trying them all I can't easily figure out which those are on adaptive (and I think concerted practice on the section I'm bad at would help me a lot). Both overall and last n Puzzles would be helpful (can have a hard coded n if you don't want to store all win/loss history - 100?)

Oh and maybe one more request on that last theme. Maybe being able to have checkboxes to include/exclude things in the "adaptive" set, so if I'm doing well at some things I can manually exclude them (now maybe adaptive already does this, but it'd be nice to be able to tweak it myself)

Ok, one more. Being able to see the tags associated with a puzzle after you've finished would help me too. (I.e. puzzle I just did was opening, Caro-Kann, Fork)

great app, I like the adaptive style, but one piece of feedback is that, sometimes it is not clear what the goal is. For example, the language "Brilliant queen win ahead!" tells me, right, I am going to checkmate for the win with the queen in this game. But, actually the puzzle is to instead win the queen piece. "win" in chess to me always means checkmate.

Overall great app.

Amazing! Would love “premoves” so that I can input the next move before the first move’s animation completes. This will help maintain flow state for your more experienced users.

See chessbook for an app that does this really well.

Awesome. I’ve never understood why Lichess limits the offline download to 50 puzzles.

Can you tell us about the tech stack you used and why?

Great start! Gentle feedback:

- Text hints should probably be off by default, they give too much of a hint.

- Auto-advance to next puzzle would be helpful, clicking “next puzzle” gets tiresome.

- Typo in the puzzle categories list: “Egnlish Opening”

Solo developer, no ads, no subscription. Take my money! And thanks for writing decent software.

I'm just about to leave for a long international flight, so this is absolutely perfect for me!

Glad I saw the comment about it being paid so I could get to the purchase screen before I lost internet. (As a side note, it says "Buy now for $3.99" but it's really $5.99 in my currency. Not sure if you can make the button match to the price in the locale)

Great! ...but doesn't work on my google-free Android. Ie, it requires play services. Please fix this :)

Very nice! but why not a webapp as well (for those of us who seldom use their phone and can get bored at the office)?

This looks really cool! I can't remember what article I was reading the other day but it was advocating for local first software as being the true goal of creating user friendly software -> this app absolutely meet's that goal. Looking forwards to using it.

Very cool app. Chess.com costs too much and lichess is rather ugly and has barebones puzzle support. I like how you can choose different categories. Will be using this from now on. Btw you have "Egnlish Opening" misspelled.

I don't want to detract in the slightest from this fantastic app (I will be getting it shortly), I just want to point out another set of Chess puzzles for folk like me that enjoy this stuff. Check out the World Champs app, it has puzzles (mostly) taken from actual end games:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chess-puzzles-world-champions/...

I wonder where were those 100k puzzles sourced from?

Love the app! Would love it twice as much if you allowed me to turn off the sounds (it turns off any existing podcasts or music).

If you would like a chess puzzle book, try Raymond Smullyan's The Chess Mysteries of the Arabian Knights.

https://raymondsmullyan.com/books/the-chess-mysteries-of-the...

Awesome project! Would be great if I could set goals like "solve 10 puzzles a day" and have the app track it for me.

Chess.com doesn't offer this option, so would be a neat differentiator :)

Are you going to make a desktop client?

so you scraped 100k chess puzzles, wrapped them in a UI and are selling access to more than x per day for $5

you should update the "Why" in your original post to tell the truth. this is about making $

yuk.

Thanks for rdx, it’s the way I use reddit nowadays.

I have only used OffChess briefly but one feature request I have is to remove the possible path of the piece when clicking on it (like Lichess).

Another improvement would be the placement of the “next puzzle” button, that seems to be in a crowded place.

I would buy your app, but I am on an older version of iOS that isn’t supported.

Nice app. Using moto edge 60 pro. The app navigation gets hidden under the phone navigation icons. I'd like to pay. Except without user login, I am unable to figure out if the purchase can be linkedin to my 2-3 devices (each of which may use a different Google account)

I have an iPhone 16 Pro and there is an annoying delay between tapping a move and the piece moving

Nice! Quick feedback:

- it plays sound even when my (iOS) device is muted

- would love an option to automatically go to next puzzle

Cool app. I’ve been thinking of building a similar PWA for a while now, might actually do that.

I would love to see something like this for GNU / Linux desktop. Great work!

Very cool looking! Downloaded. What tech did you build it with? :)

Love it! The notification bar on my OnePlus 13 blocks access to the triple dot settings button on the top of my screen. ither than that it's clean.

I recently deleted the chess.com app due to monthly price, so I'm thrilled to start using this app instead! Good job!

Nice. Any retrograde chess puzzles with this?

Could the hint not show the full move?

i.e. just show the piece, not the piece and where to put it?

This is cool! Is there a chess board library that you used or did you have to built it from scratch?

Where did you get the puzzles from?

For some reason I cannot download it on Android with Aurora Market, perhaps it is too new?

Congrats on the launch!

I was wondering -- how does the point-based rating system work?

I can't select the settings button on my Pixel 8 :|

Thank you and God bless you my friend :)

Installed :-)

Nice, bought to replace 'chess tactics puzzles' the addition of rating changes sold me.

Too late did I notice that there is no share fen button. I use that for harder puzzles when I want to understand why a given solution wouldn't work. Mostly just share to Chessis.

Very cool!

You attribute chess.js as MIT license ... But I'm curious where you sourced 1,000 addon puzzles for $3.99.

.... As I doubt you thought them all up yourself. You may want to attribute your non-derivative assets.

I have TacticMaster (available on F-droid) but your app looks more polished and will have to give it a try as well.

This is a nice app, but I have one bug report: When I tap on a piece, and it can capture another piece, it looks like it just can't move that way. Capturable pieces should have their background change somehow, to indicate that I can capture them.

[flagged]

The app is full screen on my Samsung mobile so your bottom navigation is underneath the onscreen Android navigation and unusable. Happy to submit an issue and screenshots if you have a GitHub repo.

Other than that, it is working nicely so far.

You had me when you said some of your best thinking happens in the bathroom.

Looks cool. On Android the UI seems to extend below the status bar at the top and below the drawer at the bottom of the screen which creates some overlapping though.

[stub for offtopicness]