Last updated on December 7th, 2025 at 10:19 am
Chess King – Learn to Play – Puzzle Game Review
Chess King – Learn to Play is a Puzzle/Education/Board game from CHESSQUEEN INC, first launched in 19th December 2017.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 2,361+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Chess King – Learn to Play Stand Out
Chess King – Learn to Play is a universe of learning courses. It includes lessons on chess tactics, strategy, and puzzles. Get prepared for battle on the chessboard online and offline with your personal chess trainer. Chess lessons are split by levels, from beginners to masters.
This is a game that has been played for thousands of years, enjoyed by people all over the world. No matter what language you speak or how you spell it – ajedrez, šachy, xadrez, チェス, satranç, scacchi, schach, șah, şahmat, 棋 – the rules remain the same. With the help of our app, you can learn how to play chess, improve your tactics, and reinforce your knowledge through practice.
The app acts as a chess trainer, providing puzzles and helping you to solve them. It conducts chess analysis, gives hints and explanations, and even shows striking refutations of potential mistakes you might make during a game of chess.
Some of the courses include a theoretical section. Theory is presented in an interactive format, allowing you to play against the computer, complete with a real chess timer. You can play chess online and work out incomprehensible moves on the board.
App features:
• 100+ courses in one app. Choose the most suitable one!
• Chess learning. Hints are shown in case of errors
• High quality puzzles, all double-checked for correctness
• You need to enter all key moves, required by the teacher
• Refutations are played for typical mistaken moves
• Computer analysis is available for any position
• Interactive theoretical lessons
• Chess tasks for kids
• Chess analysis & opening tree
• Choose your board theme and 2D chess pieces
• ELO rating history is saved
• Test mode with flexible settings
• Bookmarks for favorite exercises
• Chess offline: Full offline support
• VoiceOver support
Each course includes a free part, in which you can test the program and exercises. Lessons offered in the free version are fully functional. They allow you to test the application in real world conditions before purchasing a full version. Each course should be bought separately, but you can buy a subscription which gives you an access to all courses for a limited time. Important information about subscriptions:
• Payment will be charged to your iTunes Account at confirmation of purchase.
• Your subscription will automatically renew unless auto-renew is turned off at least 24-hours before the end of the current subscription period.
• Your account will be charged for renewal within 24-hours prior to the end of the current subscription period. Automatic renewals will cost the same price you were originally charged for the subscription.
• You can manage your subscriptions and turn off auto-renewal by going to your iTunes Account Settings after purchase.
• Any unused portion of a free trial, if offered, will be forfeited if you purchase a subscription.
• Privacy policy and terms of use: https://chessking.com/ios_privacy_policy.html
You can study the following courses in the app:
• Learn Chess: From Beginner to Club Player
• Chess Strategy & Tactics
• Chess Tactics Art (1400-1800 ELO)
• Bobby Fischer – Chess master
• Manual of Chess Combinations
• Chess Tactics for Beginners
• Advanced Defense (Chess Puzzles)
• Chess Strategy (1800-2400)
• Total Chess Endgames (1600-2400 ELO)
• Chess Middlegame
• CT-ART 4.0 (Chess Tactics 1200-2400 ELO)
• Mate in 1, 2, 3-4
• Elementary Chess Tactics
• Chess Opening Blunders
• Chess Endings for Beginners
• Chess Opening Lab (1400-2000)
Chess is a game for intelligent people. Playing chess with friends online or offline is great fun. Chess King – Learn to Play is an excellent way to learn how to play chess, improve your chess analysis, and develop your chess tactics and strategy. Use chess lessons and puzzles to master the game.
Terms of Use: https://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/dev/stdeula/
This Puzzle game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Chess King – Learn to Play is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 29th October 2025
Recent improvements include:
- Added "Tactical Mastery", “Opening Repertoire”, “The Royal Challenge” curriculums to the University
- Added Game analysis dialog to Engine analysis mode
- Various fixes and improvements
Download & Availability
Chess King – Learn to Play is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Chess King – Learn to Play on App Store
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:
Works well, syncs to your phone easily! Theres no excuse at not getting better at chess. This helps with tactics, strategy, endgames.
The app works great on our iPad, and we love the wealth of content for tactics, openings, and strategy. Our only suggestion would be an option to turn off slow enemy animations, as they can feel tedious on longer puzzles. If this gets added, Id be happy to update our review to 5 stars.
We like to use these apps from time to time, however we cannot find a way to reset a course. We completed half of ct art years ago and would like to restart fresh but can find no function to do so. This is a standard Chessable feature for example.
Loved chess king until it stopped acknowledging our subscription when it updated feb 4th. Content that we were using is locked. We have contacted support twice in two days but have not received a response. Whats up? Ends up you must restore purchase the apple. App is great again.
Even with piece animation on 4x speed the animations are very slow. This wastes a lot of time. There are also puzzles where winning moves are marked incorrect.
Ive only just purchased this app a couple of days ago and we would say, for a person thats only semi savvy on the computer, this app is not necessarily user friendly. We paid the $12.99 so we were surprised how busy the interface was and the use of the voice for the videos. It took us a few times to figure out where to even start. We say all this because we hope things can either be fixed or maybe, its just like the developers want it to be, in which case, Ill move on to a more beginner friendly app. This app may be for the more advanced. Thats okay too. We did figure out how to slow down the computer voice so we could at least keep up with the info. Our suggestion is that the interface should be broken down into digestible courses. As a beginner, we dont even know the pieces or how they move. We dont even want to discuss theory, as exciting as that sounds! Please take this review with the humility it was submitted. Thank you.
This is not the flashiest chess app but, for us, its the best! Ive used chess.com, Magnus, Chessable, etc, and this one is the best. The learning techniques and puzzles are thoughtful and skill appropriate. Very happy with our purchase.
The user interface is harder than trying to learn chess.
This is a great app with many training courses. The only three things we would like to change is to make those courses free, tell us how to do something before giving us the course, and add a basics course.
This is a great app for practicing tactics. There are many courses at very affordable cost. Make sure you do not subscribe from the App Store, but from their website so that your subscription works in the app and on their website.
So underrated. You can spend so much on chess books/courses (and we have) on a variety of websites. This is the best training tool Ive ever come across and the courses are so cheap. Our personal favorite course is Chess Endings for Beginners. 5 stars.
Chess King is an amazing comprehensive suite of chess learning software. From learning the game through master level, Chess King has it fully covered! Openings, tactics, strategy, blunders, end games, mating patterns, (etc.) and theres a Chess King suite for that component of chess! Thousands of lessons, examples, and training tests! An unbelievable account of teaching materials! And, the quality of the materials is of the highest level! Chess King does NOT fill up lessons with weak examples! Chess King products have the highest quality lessons and the explanations are provided in comprehensive excellent English! We highly recommend Chess King for beginners, and club players through master level players who are looking to improve their chess performance! The absolute BEST chess learning product we own! Nothing else comes close in sheer volume, breath of scope AND the high quality of materials.
This app in addition to the website is amazing.. Its provocative and challenging.. But, theres plenty of room to improve it.. Make it more flexible and user friendly.. Upgrade the design it looks like from the 90s the website needs lots of work also.. Nevertheless we find ourselves visiting the app and the website more and more.. Good luck and thank you.
This is the best chess training software that you never heard of! We recently took up chess again after not playing for about 30 years! We feel like somebody who just got out of a time machine because of all the amazing resources available to quickly get ourselves back up to speed. None of this existed when we last played chess. We highly recommend the chess king line of software for anyone.
We definitely see our game improving when we go through the courses. It's probably one of the best trainers out there currently. We'd say there's room for improvement on interface, presentation, and features, but still worth it if you're trying to up your game.
Chess king is a fabulous app. Our issue is that for a beginner its confusing to use. Lack of instructions and while you try to solve the problem it changes everything around on you. You have no options to disable it and cause problems trying to follow and solve it.
Ive never enjoyed Chess so much. We prefer working with this app, whether on our iPhone or on our iPad, to playing an actual gamewhen playing games, Im confused and our opponent is confused we blunder and he blunders. We enjoy more learning and improving, knowing that Im getting it right. The developer of this app must be related to our math teacher. She would teach us a concept, then give us 20 homework problems to chisel it in stone Next day, another concept, and another set of homework problems. This app is similarly done plenty of problems to reinforce each concept. Its great on our iPhone, but we love it best on our iPad. We set our display to dark mode in the iPad settings. Then, in the app settings, you can choose your board, choose your pieces. We like the wooden board and the Kosal pieces (for the greater contrast between the black and white pieces). We like the discreet chocolate arrow move marker. When it comes to purchasing, its very confusing. Ive learned that you can purchase an app in the App Store (for a reasonable fee) and you own it. There is no subscription. OR, you can subscribe to a suite of Learning units, paying monthly In the Apple App Store, we downloaded the app Chess King Learn to Play. Within that app, Im happy to have purchased Tactics For Beginners for $12.99. With Apple, it was never clear to us whether we had paid once, twice, or three times for that unit (Tactics For Beginners). Ive purchased dozens of apps from Apple, but Ive never encountered this kind of confusion in the purchasing department. Also, sorry to say, we were not able to find an instructional video on YouTube, or anywhere else, that explained adequately all the bells and whistles. For that, you have to feel your way. That done, you will be supremely glad that you did. This is far the best app that Ive encountered, try it, youll love it.
The app is great but sound cuts out too often. This needs fixing.
We are not a good chess player. We started playing when we were around 11 years old. But never worked at improving periodically when we were at college, we also would play but again never practiced or did chess problems. We are now a senior citizen and have time to do lots and lots of chess problems on various apps. This app is the best for getting us to understand some fairly sophisticated combinations. As we get better, the problems get harder. We hardly recommend this app. We dont know enough to recommend their online program.
We would love to see any course related to the art of attack, like for example: how to attack the Kingside, commun attack on the Kingside, how to develop the attack according to the pawn chain.
This definitely is a challenge regardless if you are a beginner arequite good.
- You shouldn't increase rating when doing puzzles; you should increase rating when you beat the computer 2. There should be online chess (playing chess live with actual people online) and that increases your rating too we have no hate; it's a great app, just needs a little improvement.
This is a good chess learning tool, however, we purchased a couple courses on our android device and have recently switched to iPhone. Meaning we are no longer able to access the courses we purchased. We have tried contacting customer support multiple times and have not received a response back. Beware if you purchase anything.
They force you to sign up for a plan before you can even try it for free. Wasted our time.
Fun efficient way to review opening themes.
Its the beeeeeeeesssssssstttttttt thank you – anonymous.
This app has ebooks, exercises, and sorts them by category. It has world chess championship annotated games. A lot of free and cheap paid content thats great! CT-Art 4.0 is inside it. This last one has been around forever and created National masters or even stronger ones.
Great teaching and training platform.
You can use this app on iOS and on the web. We like this desktop version because we can use it without distractions. It also has a "test" feature that we can't find on the web version. Some of these courses exist on paper book form, too. But the app lets you go through more exercises faster. It syncs with the web and mobile apps, so what's not to like.
Their opening course helped us to not blunder so much and won more.
What do the colored graphic hints mean? So far Ive seen red squares, yellow, pink, and green highlighted squares. The apps help section and websites help section dont explain anything.
The app itself is great, but the available content and courses are even better. The Developers are responsive. The courses are comprehensive and cover all player levels. Their content will keep you busy for a long time (and chess improvement requires a lot of drrills).
While the price for maximum lifetime subscription is a bit steep, its worth it. You will never run out of exercises, regardless of your chess skills. What is important, it is well optimized for iPads.
We love the learning programs but we wish there were more lessons about different openings with their names as well as how to respond to said openings. Otherwise we love the way it is set up. How accurate are the chess ratings given to the user.
We had previously purchased CT-ART tactics and then suddenly we have to repurchase it!? Tried using the restore purchases and nope. Terrible to make a shameless cash grab on the most popular item in the app.
This is probably the best tactics app out there. And Ive tried a dozen or so.
Love this game can we get a higher level.
Useful app. Various actions do cause it to hang and/or crash on our platform e.g. The animation interface, using the pager toward the top of the screen and sometimes during practice sessions. In instances where it will not restart at all, we have to go into the Library folder and delete the ChessKing container folder, which causes us to lose all our saved progress.
Critical thinking to analyze the moves to make before we play chess which we like when learning to practice and problem solving, we AM HAVING FUN THANK-YOU TEAM.
This is the best app for practicing tactics. Do not subscribe from the App Store, but from their website so that your subscription works in the app and on their website.
Affordable. Nice UI. It doesn't take too much space. Doesn't need an internet connection to work.
The code chessoptics10 will get you a 10 percent discount.
Learning chess has never been so awesome.
This is the best chess teacher ever.
One of the best Apps out there. It will provide you with all the training you need to become a tournament player and beyond. Charles Stevens.
We first heard of this app from IM Kostya on Youtube.. He had recommended the CRT-ART for tactics. Of all the ones ive have used we find this the best. We have also purchased a few other courses from Chess King. Like them all. Highly recommended.
There are many solid courses available through this app but the UI is extremely poor and does not seem to be prioritized at all. It is a frustrating experience. Text is formatted awkwardly and there seems to be numerous encoding issues. Arranging content in tabs instead of a steady flow makes for an annoying experience overall. Potential to be a great app but is unfortunately very dated at this point.
Seriously helps for those that missed the boat on tactical training as a child.
We are learning to look at all situtations. We are still having a bit of trouble seeing the landscape with all of those moving trees but the experience is over the top. We are learning as we go and we are an old person. This is one of the best experiences, expecially when we get one of those " oh yea" moments. Thanks, we still don't know when to give up pieces to gain advantage, other tricks as well. This is not and over night learning – it is a way of looking at the situtation — we feel really dumb sometime – thanks for this experience.
Once a day keeps the checkmates away.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 5.4.0
- Size: 90.64 MB
- iOS: 13.0 or later
- Languages: AR, NL, EN, FR, DE, EL, HE, HU, ID, IT, JA, NB, PL, PT, RO, RU, ZH, ES, SV, ZH, TR, VI
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: CHESSQUEEN INC
Last updated: 29th October 2025 | Genre: Puzzle, Education | Developer: CHESSQUEEN INC