Last updated on February 4th, 2026 at 11:30 am
Chess-wise 3 – Board Game Review
Chess-wise 3 is a Board/Entertainment game from Marcel J Nijman, first launched in 7th February 2014.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 16+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Chess-wise 3 Stand Out
With Chess-wise 3 you can play chess, analyse games, annotate game notations, play online, solve exercises, watch training videos and much more.
- Games are represented as trees, so they can have side-lines. This means when analysing moves, this will not anymore overwrite the moves of the main game
- On the new annotation screen, you can add comments and !! – or ?? to the moves
- The communication with the FICS server has been complete rewritten and is now much more stable
- The FICS interface has more features (support for multiple accounts, iMessage-like chatting, friend list)
- Improved database (re-order games in a PGN file) and setup screen (move pieces on the board)
- Landscape views for the opening and endgame browser, showing the possible moves next to the board
- Over 250 links to free training videos
- Separate screen to select the pieces orientation, when playing with 2 players
- Help file with tutorial for each major use case
Each screen has been re-designed to give a better user experience, focussing on the main actions that people want to do on that screen.
Any suggestions for further improvements (as well as bug reports) are welcome at [email protected]
This Board game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Chess-wise 3 is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 17th October 2018
Recent improvements include:
- compatible with currently available iPhones and iPads
- import games from clipboard
- retrieve forgotten Multi password
PRO: - peek button for blind chess
Download & Availability
Chess-wise 3 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:
Overall we like this app. Pretty much everything works, but we have a problem changing the level of difficulty in the settings. It is not accessible to a screen reader and probably needs to be redone so that it is accessible. Im told its a drop-down menu but we cant access or change it from the hardest level as its set as the default.
When it works, it works great. But half of the times, the FCIS option where we want to play speed chess against others the lag of device input renders playing not possible. Sometimes hard booting our iPhone XR and then relaunching the ChessWise app seem to solve the issue, but recently that doesnt appear to do much anymore.
Best light-weight chess client for FICS we've found, and it's also free99.
We have been using Chess-wise for several years. Im a club player and we find it easy to enter games on our phone after we play one over the board while at the site and the game is still fresh in our mind. We can export and import PGN files with ease to / from our computer in various ways. We also find its a very usable FICS client. The databasing and analysis tools make a great reader companion and when we run on an iPad its as useful as a very pricey pc program. The links to the latest tournaments and videos are a real nice touch. Once we had an import pgn issue and the developer personally responded within days and issued a patch quickly. For just a few bucks, we have seen this app grow with features over the last few years. There are occasional quirks after a release but they get fixed because the dev is active. Its fair to ask a few bucks because we have seen the effort that has been put back into this app over time.
Pretty good app we guess but some top players such as Capablanca and Judit Polgar are missing from the players list of top players. At least in our (2017) version. This doesnt instill confidence in the reliability of other parts. Hope the tablebase part is 100% accurate.
Very nice app. If Timestamp feature was added, to avoid eating your clock away due to Internet lag, this will be 6 stars. Also we are very impressed by the latest upgrade. Now it includes all the features of blind chess and more.
Navigation within the game is illogical and beyond awkward. The developer apparently gave up on the game.
We can't start a new game, it always crashes. Please, fix it.
This is the best FICS chess application out there. Most of the bugs were fixed. There is still the bug on the iPhone when the chess board is expanded over the entire screen. The time is shown on top of the board making it hard to see.
Not working properly and crashes. Our database wouldn't load. No notation on the side when analyzing moves Just don't like this at all Do something with this or it will go south.
When there is a mate, a window pops up obscuring the board and it cannot be removed, so if u did not see the mate, you cannot see it.
Please do something about all of the robots on your app or in FICS. If we wanted to play against a computer we would not log online.
The app is not suited for any game requiring fast moves let alone premoves. Loss on time is guaranteed.
We find the exercises to be very useful. We have 'gone pro' in version 2 for our iPad and iPhone. We upgraded to V.3 on our iPad yesterday. Downloading V.3 for our iPhone this morning and it appears that we will be required to purchase another copy to 'go pro' again. Seriously! We're not trying to take advantage of the developer. We get that V.3 is a completely new re-write and we are willing to support that. However, we don't believe that we should pay for one more copy when we are only ever going to use one copy at a time.
It should be noted upfront that this app does not enable you to login to freechess.org with your own account. Only guest login is available unless you buy an in-app upgrade of $1.99. Why is this developer not open about this with his customers.
We think this is the best chess app on iOS. There is so much to do within this app and so many great features! Chess-wise has the best VoiceOver support out of all the chess apps we have used thus far.
We can't play any rated games although we are signed in with our handle according to our client. But when we ask our opponents they tell us that they are playing against a guest. We did pay 1.99 and we are using the pro. The rates games toggle appears but our guess is that it always sends out unrated games request.
This is a great app for annotation of games. We use it to study the various positions in our chess books while entering the moves. This app allows you to enter positions with annotations and various lines. It has a number of other features like 300 tactics. We hope in the future to see some in app purchases like an option to buy more tactical exercises, Opening database etc. This app is the best app we can see in the App Store to annotate games with multiple lines in pgn form. We have searched hard to find an app like this. We are a 2100 FIDE player and really enjoy the tool to improve our game. We upgraded to the pro version and felt like we should have paid more for such a quality chess app. Keep up the good work.
He did not bother to update his old app to latest version. Instead issued issued the update in a different app !!!!. Such attitude should be stopped. Certainly we'll not even bother to download this new app.
This is an identical clone to the other app but just more unstable.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 3.5.0
- Size: 42.09 MB
- iOS: 9.0 or later
- Languages: NL, EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Marcel J Nijman
Last updated: 17th October 2018 | Genre: Board, Entertainment | Developer: Marcel J Nijman