Master Varied Strategies: Check Out the Best 6 Unique Chess Apps

July 20 is recognized by UNESCO as International Chess Day to commemorate the founding day of the International Chess Federation (FIDE). It’s a great time to start your journey to learn how to play chess online for free. But if you’re already a regular player, why not use this day to shake things up?

Have you ever played three-player chess? Or how about a game of chess where you don’t take turns but keep playing all the time? From chess variants that challenge you to discard classical strategies and think anew to playing chess with AI for fun or to get your FIDE rating, these are some of the quirkiest and most fun ways to play a different type of chess.

1. Noctie

Based on wins, losses, and draws, FIDE assigns an official Elo rating to players, with Candidate Masters starting at 2000. Of course, this is only for those participating in official tournaments. But if you’ve ever wondered what your rating would be, you can find out by playing a game with Noctie AI.

Noctie learns as you play and tries to match your skill level, and estimates your rating. You are allowed one takeback in the game, and the AI can also offer one idea if you’re stuck. Apart from that, it’s a standard game of chess with five minutes per move. At the end of the game, whether you win or lose, Noctie will tell you what your FIDE rating would be, as well as the equivalent rating on LiChess, the best free app to play chess online .

For reference, you can refer to the Wikipedia Elo rating range table. Above a rating of 1000, every 2000 points puts you in a different class of chess player.

2. Kung Fu Chess

Chess is a turn-by-turn game, and the standard game encourages taking your time to think through each move. Kung Fu Chess changes the rules to remove the turn-by-turn style. You can move any piece at any moment without waiting for the opponent to make a move. It’s basically taking the principles of real-time strategy games like Age of Empires and applying them to chess.

Apart from waiting for your turn, the rest of the rules of chess are intact. The pieces move and behave like standard, and the objective is to capture the king. When you move a piece to any square, the square turns yellow and starts cooling down, blocking you from moving the piece for 10 seconds. You can obviously move any other piece in that cooldown period. You can also see the cooldown effect on the opponent’s pieces. The idea is to plan your movements in such a way that you can make the perfect moves.

Beginners should ideally start with the Kung Fu Chess solo campaign mode to play against a bot to learn and practice the new rules. Once you’re confident, you can play against AI or a friend in both standard or lightning modes.

3. Chesswith.Ai

Among the many cool things to do with ChatGPT is to use it to chat with a fictional character. Chesswith.Ai has created profiles of several popular fictional characters and even real historical people such as Harry Potter, Dwight Schrute, John F. Kennedy, Marie Curie, etc. And you can now play a game of chess with them while they chat with you.

The AI difficulty level doesn’t change according to the chosen opponent, so you can set that as very easy, easy, medium, hard, and very hard. After every move made, the chatbot responds with a small message that would befit the personality, while also commenting on the game’s status or borrowing from chess theory.

The free version of Chesswith.Ai gives you one credit when you verify your account, which allows you to make 40 moves—the average length of any game. You’ll need to purchase additional credits to play further moves or games.

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4. Halfchess

Halfchess is made for those who don’t have the time to play a full game of chess but want to get a quick game in. Instead of a blitz game though, Halfchess reduces the size of the board. While the standard board is 8x8 squares, Halfchess is set on a 4x8 board. It also reduces you to a maximum of 8 pieces.

It’s best to start playing against AI, where you’ll get a series of challenges where the pieces change in each game. It’s challenging to try and finish the game on limited real estate with fewer pieces, and several users have noted how Halfchess has actually helped them refine their end game.

You can also undo a couple of moves in each game. When you’re in an obvious position of piece advantage, Halfchess allows you to claim a victory so that you don’t waste further time. While playing with friends, you can set a maximum time and even choose to play in Blind Mode. In Blind Mode, pieces disappear after 5 seconds, forcing you to remember where everything is.

Download: Half Chess for Android |iOS (Free)

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5. Really Bad Chess

Eight pawns on the second row. Two rooks, knights, and bishops from out to in on the first row, with the king and queen between them. That’s the standard chessboard. Really Bad Chess says, “Nah!” You’ll still start with 16 pieces on the first two rows, but any piece could be anywhere and even repeat—except the King, who starts in the usual spot. The other 15 are completely random.

Really Bad Chess is really mad. The ranked mode lets you keep playing game after game trying to beat the AI, and your ranking changes based on how you did, adjusting the AI for the next game. You can also challenge yourself with the daily board and the weekly challenge to compete on a leaderboard with other users. The objective is to beat the AI in the fewest moves possible.

The game offers and encourages you to use Undo Moves, which you can earn by watching ads or paying. You can also pay to unlock an offline player-vs-player mode on a single device, remove all banner ads, and get 100 undos.

Download: Really Bad Chess for Android |iOS (Free)

6. Green Chess

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If you're digging the idea of playing chess variants, you need to register for an account at Green Chess. This website has the largest collection of chess variants and an active community of users, so you're likely to find a match-up quickly.

One of the most popular games on Green Chess is 3-player chess. It’s played with three half boards (4x8) that are distorted in shape to join at a center, turning it into a hexagon. Apart from white and black, the third player is usually red and has the last turn.

Green Chess categorizes the variants by types, such as different initial positions, different board sizes, randomly changing pieces, modified rules, different shapes of boards, three-player chess, and four-player chess. Create a game, join from the lobby, or start learning by watching someone else’s public game.

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Play Chess Variants Offline

If you like this variety of different ways to play chess, you can even do them offline with friends. Games that use the regular board and pieces but change the rules are the easiest to implement, like Anti-Chess. For some others, you can get creative.

For example, play the Chance variant, where after you select which piece you want to move, it changes to a random other piece. The randomizer is easy online, but you can do it offline with a dice. Assign a number to King, Queen, Rook, Bishop, Knight, and Pawn, and roll the dice after you’ve picked the piece to move.