Last updated on November 29th, 2025 at 04:07 pm
Chess Tactics for Beginners – Education Game Review
Chess Tactics for Beginners is a Education/Board/Puzzle game from CHESSQUEEN INC, first launched in 6th September 2016.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 1,026+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Chess Tactics for Beginners Stand Out
This course is based on a bestseller by the experienced coach Sergey Ivashchenko which became a sort of chess publishing sensation and sold over 200,000 copies. More than 1300 training exercises are intended for beginners, both children and adults. Elementary and simple tasks (1-, 2- and 3-way) are used as teaching material.
This course is in the series Chess King Learn (https://learn.chessking.com/), which is an unprecedented chess teaching method. In the series are included courses in tactics, strategy, openings, middle game, and endgame, split by levels from beginners to experienced players, and even professional players.
With the help of this course, you can improve your chess knowledge, learn new tactical tricks and combinations, and consolidate the acquired knowledge into practice.
The program acts as a coach who gives tasks to solve and helps to solve them if you get stuck. It will give you hints, explanations and show you even striking refutation of the mistakes you might make.
Advantages of the program:
• High quality examples, all double-checked for correctness
• You need to enter all key moves, required by the teacher
• Different levels of complexity of the tasks
• Various goals, which need to be reached in the problems
• The program gives hint if an error is made
• For typical mistaken moves, the refutation is shown
• You can play out any position of the tasks against the computer
• Interactive theoretical lessons
• Structured table of contents
• The program monitors the change in the rating (ELO) of the player during the learning process
• Test mode with flexible settings
• Possibility to bookmark favorite exercises
• The application is adapted to the bigger screen of a tablet
• The application does not require an internet connection
The course includes a free part, in which you can test the program. Lessons offered in the free version is fully functional. They allow you to test the application in real world conditions before releasing the following topics:
- Mate in 1
1.1. Rook checkmates
1.2. Queen checkmates
1.3. Bishop checkmates
1.4. Knight checkmates
1.5. Pawn checkmates
1.6. Mate in 1 - Winning material
2.1. Gain a rook
2.2. Gain a knight
2.3. Gain a bishop
2.4. Gain a queen - Draw
- Mate in 2
4.1. Double check
4.2. Queen checkmates
4.3. Rook checkmates
4.4. Knight checkmates
4.5. Bishop checkmates
4.6. Pawn checkmates - Sacrifice material
5.1. Queen sacrifice
5.2. Rook sacrifice
5.3. Bishop sacrifice
5.4. Knight sacrifice - How to proceed?
This Education game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Chess Tactics for Beginners is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 18th January 2018
Recent improvements include:
This app has been updated by Apple to display the Apple Watch app icon.
• App is updated for iPhone X
• New home screen
• Disabled automatic playback of refutations
• Option to reset password
• Renaming of account
• Various fixes and improvements
Download & Availability
Chess Tactics for Beginners is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Chess Tactics for Beginners 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:
We love so much our coach recommended it and made us gain 500 elo just try it.
Anybody who wants to learn/improve in chess needs this! We went over this whole thing at least 4 times and dramatically improved.
Good app. No complaints. Quality problems.
Its a rich learning process but you get as much as you put into the training.
Well done and polished. Plenty of great material to work through. Looking forward to extending our training with the full course.
It helps us a lot so in games we can see more tactics and win more games.
Excellent use of visuals and puzzles to train the chess beginner in the best moves under tightly constrained conditions.
We started this app a little while ago and we enjoy the flow. We do have a question though, if we buy the premium version will that allow us to play against other players or is the whole app even premium just a strategy app.
Free one is very beginner level.
Chess content is great. Unfortunately the developer has neglected updating all its standalone apps since releasing it's Chess king app. No updates for many years now. To top it off, this app (and most other standalone apps from this dev) copies whatever you have on your clipboard on app startup. This may well be an innocent bug which went unfixed since this app was neglected by its dev. It may also be an intentional invasion of privacy.
As a relative novice, we really appreciate the lesson design. But the inability to shut off the blasted rating update after every single match is horrible. As one would expect, the lessons progress in difficulty which is very helpful. Watching our score drop after every single mistake, over and over and over, is the antithesis of helpful. Its frustrating and demoralizing. Its exactly enough to know when Ive erred. Its not necessary to constantly rub it in. We should be able to shut off the judge (instant rank updates) and just LEARN. This punishment-centered approach is demonstrably inferior and unnecessary. Get rid of it, and this would be a four or five star app. We bought this to get better at chess, not to be constantly harangued for the very ignorance Im working hard to address. Give us an option to SHUT IT OFF.
The exercises are excellent but the app itself is buggy and frustrating.
When you open the app, it pastes from your clipboard. There isnt any good reason for this we can think of, besides maybe reading a FEN automatically, which this app doesnt do. Seems like an invasion of privacy.
We are enjoying this app so much.
Not this app in particular because it is simply a beginner app, in regards to mastery, however all of the apps collectively and thorough study would lead to mastery, and this is a minor fee in the scheme of thing for the serious player.
We've been using this app quite a bit we've the last few days and believe it's helping us improve. Excited to see how deep it takes us.
Tactics is one of the single best ways to strengthen your chess vision and develop your ability to perceive "imbalances" per Silman. These are great studies that will only enhance your play.
Excellent app. The exercises start off easy, but there are plenty of challenging and interesting puzzles here as well. Highly recommended.
There are lots of great features but we wish the tactics there would offer more obvious ways to know what you're trying to do. Instead of saying, "play for advantage" it would be so much more helpful for us if it said something like, "capture the rook in 3 moves." It would also be helpful if there were little notes about why a move is good or bad. Sometimes in tactic exercises the correct move will be to get your own queen captured, and as a novice we don't always understand why that's a good idea. Overall a very good app.
Our favorite chess problem set of all time by Ivanchenko in a fantastic implementation on iOS. The problems are so well considered, progressive and deep they warrant repeated study. Matches the classic works Chess School 1a and 1b.
This is the Mount Olympus of chess learning apps. Don't waste your money on anything else. This is so much better than anything else out there we just want to burst out laughing. The app itself is elegant and just beautiful. THE COURSES ARE THE BEST IN THE WORLD FOR IPHONE OR PC FOR THAT MATTER. All other chess apps are pathetic in comparison. They have CT-Arts which is a classic. They have courses on openings, endgames, and middle games for beginner on up to ELO of 2400 level. If you love chess and have an iPhone you'll love these course!! Buy it.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.2
- Size: 41.86 MB
- iOS: 8.0 or later
- Languages: NL, EN, FR, DE, EL, IT, PL, PT, RO, RU, ZH, ES, ZH, TR
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: [CHESSQUEEN INC]()
Last updated: 18th January 2018 | Genre: Education, Board | Developer: CHESSQUEEN INC