Last updated on December 14th, 2025 at 12:48 pm
Lazy Chess – Puzzle Game Review
Lazy Chess is a Puzzle/Board/Education game from Cinq-Mars Media, first launched in 26th January 2021.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 67+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Lazy Chess Stand Out
Lazy Chess is a free, non-profit game created for casual players and enthusiasts alike, where players, at worst, make the second best move available to them. On average, there are more than 30 legal chess moves available to a player in a turn, creating vigintillions of possibilities throughout a game. Lazy Chess compresses that by having you choose only two in a given turn selected by Stockfish, the most robust chess engine in the world. The catch? You won’t know which move is the best!
Learn and have fun while you compete against a highly skilled AI or online friends and random opponents. Unlock new themes and settings that can change how many options you choose from or the difficulty of the AI. Hone your chess skills while you move up in the leaderboards and play unique scenarios of famous board states provided from some of the world's most active grandmasters.
Lazy Chess is open source and available on GitHub. It was developed by Cinq-Mars Media, an educational non-profit with projects and games featured at E3, PAX and festivals worldwide.
This Puzzle game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Lazy Chess is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 22nd March 2021
Recent improvements include:
Several bug fixes and stability improvements. Fixed an issue where the new openings engine interfered with online gameplay for some users.
Download & Availability
Lazy Chess is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
We really enjoyed Lazy Chess, as we are a relative novice at the game end enjoy having an unobtrusive tutor to help improve our game. We could probably go to individual web sites to garner the information that Lazy Chess provides, but it does provide that lazy help that makes it so convenient. We also like the idea of levels and modes to both provide additional challenges and give us a way of gauging our progress in improving our game.
This game is great for all levels off chess players. We hadnt played chess in years but this game allowed us to ease in and relearn the basic of the game before moving on to harder levels and increasing the difficulty. It is a lot of fun and a great way to get better at the game of chess.
This game makes chess fun and relaxing. Chess has always been a little stressful to us, and this has made it almost meditative. It's also just a great logic puzzle… Highly reccomended.
Never really played chess before, but this game is pretty fun. Its satisfying as a time-waster but we dont really care about getting better at chess. Two stars off for sketchy ads and data policy. Why does a chess game app need our location? Trying to clear data harvesting (spyware) games off our phone, so now deleted.
This games engine is awful even a beginner we can see how many opportunitys the engine just ignores the moves provided are almost always no where near the bets moves you could make just in our latest game along rather than have our king take a rook saving our rook the engine decided to make our king runaway resulting in the loss of our rook extending the time the game took.
Constantly while trying to play, itll bring up its own download page for no reason. Also all the features that are interesting are hidden behind stars aka premium currency. We dont mind apps wanting money to be ad free, but asking us to watch 15 videos to unlock each individual feature is insane.
Lazy Chess lets us play chess like we play crossword puzzles – its almost meditative. Its the perfect mix of brain teaser and strategy. We find ourselves playing it all the time, but it doesnt feel like empty calories or wasted time, because… Well, its chess! Simple idea, super well done.
So much fun. Just hope the app icon can be changed(it looks cute but always makes us forget its a chess game app).
It's a neat idea and is sometimes fun. We decided to delete the app after having a winning position in an endgame with three passed pawns, but move after move your engine won't give us an option to push a pawn, and is instead only offering king moves that would eventually lead to a draw by repetition. This would be more fun for high level players if you had a better engine. Definitely a neat idea though.
We like the concept but would like to play online vs people. For that you need 14 stars, but we dont seem to get any stars for milestones or watching ads past 6 stars.
On paper it has an interesting concept but gets boring half way into the first game, theres no learning curve because no matter what you make the second best move, its a cool concept but isnt fun to play theres no repercussions you basically cant lose if facing a bot its not fun and its too easy.
No stress. It can teach you how to play or really improve your skills. This presentation is elegant, simple, entertaining & surprisingly challenging.
What a fantastic chess app… Perfect for developing new strategies… Whether beginner or an advanced player, there is much for you to explore… This app is stylish and very well designed… We love it.
We are a casual chess player who enjoys the game but generally loses. Lazy Chess is great because we only have two choices, making it much quicker than a regular game, and we are learning new moves from the AI. We will be recommending this to all of our friends. It is definitely more exciting than the usual AI chess games, and we look forward to trying it with friends online.
First of all, switching between your available moves is so slow. One tap should move both pieces instead of one at a time. Most of the game is analyzing your moves, and the animation adds so much waiting. Next, the best/worst move notifier or whatever is not that accurate. Many moves we feel were way more valuable then the other were often the worst even though the cpu had nothing to play off of us with. This game is interesting but not worth the full version in the current state. Also, the price seems steep for not many features currently.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.6
- Size: 34.78 MB
- iOS: 11.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Cinq-Mars Media
Last updated: 22nd March 2021 | Genre: Puzzle, Board | Developer: Cinq-Mars Media