HIARCS Chess for iPad
Step into the gaming world with HIARCS Chess for iPad, one of the top $9.99 games in the App Store! Crafted with creativity and innovation by Applied Computer Concepts Ltd., this captivating Education game is bound to grab your attention. With its content rating of 4+, it caters to a wide audience. Ever since its release on 12th September 2011, it has been constantly updated, with the latest version rolled out on 4th October 2022.
Whether you have a liking for Education, Board, or Strategy games, HIARCS Chess for iPad is sure to keep you hooked!
User Ratings
Join the crowd of 149 gamers who have given their verdict on HIARCS Chess for iPad.
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Dive into HIARCS Chess for iPad
HIARCS is a multiple World Championship winning chess program and the only handheld chess program which has won matches and tournaments with Grandmasters. It twice won the Mercusor Cup tournament in Buenos Aires, Argentina ahead of Grandmasters, the last time with a performance beyond 2900 Elo, the best chess performance rating for any handheld device in history.
In 1997 the World’s strongest ever human chess player, Garry Kasparov, said "HIARCS is much better positionally than Deep Blue" and ex World champion, Vishy Anand, in a recent 2011 interview when asked what chess program he uses to analyse with said "generally I use HIARCS".
HIARCS Chess for iPad harnesses this chess power to enable your iPad to play chess like a super Grandmaster, analyse games and chess problems with you, or play at whatever weakened chess strength you want from beginner to GM strength while offering numerous features to help you learn and improve as you play with HIARCS. An advanced set of coaching features helps players of all strengths improve their chess play.
HIARCS Chess has a full range of realistic weaker opponent strengths and playing styles catering for players of all abilities from absolute beginners to Grandmasters. On the weaker playing levels HIARCS will make human-like mistakes appropriate to the level of play and this together with the integrated coach advice, assessments and alerts allow you to learn and improve quickly. HIARCS also monitors your chess performance and provides you with an Elo chess rating which tracks your chess ability in every game. It can continuously adjust its playing strength to give you challenging but beatable opponents as you improve.
HIARCS Chess will save battery life by using much less energy on the weaker levels, allowing more playing time on long journeys etc.
You can transfer PGN game databases to and from HIARCS Chess and load/save your chess games in PGN format, it even has databases of all the games between Fischer & Spassky and Kasparov & Karpov for you to play through and enjoy.
HIARCS has a large tournament book which is up to date with chess theory with over 235,000 variations. The book moves are displayed on screen with chess symbols and the opening variations are named and ECO coded.
Key features:
- Extremely Strong chess program, genuine beyond strong GM-level performance
- Suitable for all players from absolute beginners to strong Grandmasters with many handicap levels and opponents styles and advanced coaching
- Intuitive and friendly, iPad tailored, user interface supporting all four screen orientations with multiple high quality piece sets, colour schemes and icons
- Multiple playing modes: play white, black, both sides in two player mode, continuous analysis and interactive replay
- Fully adjustable Elo strengths, adaptive levels and multiple playing levels and opponents
- All levels below maximum are low energy to increase battery life
- Rates your chess play and gives you an Elo rating which is updated after each game
- Advanced coaching provides move options, hints, move safety and quality highlights and watches your play to warn about mistakes
- Transfer PGN databases to/from HIARCS chess via iTunes file sharing, load/save PGNs, email games and PGN DBs from HIARCS
- Set up or edit a position to analyse or play from
- Advanced game navigation with move slider and VCR buttons for rapid and precise game navigation
- Many selectable preset blitz, incremental and average time clock settings for timed play
- Large HIARCS tournament opening book as used by the professionals!
- Permanent brain for enhanced playing strength
- Numerous chess display functions for showing chess moves, analysis, book moves, coach advice, move quality even legal moves
- Integrated Html manual and help screens
What’s Fresh in the Latest Update?
Discover what’s new in the recent update of HIARCS Chess for iPad on 4th October 2022:
- Fix to long time control issue
+ Improved coaching for white and black, shows mistakes and missed better moves - Improved Dark.mode support
- Improved Millennium eBoard support
- Coaching support on eBoards with LEDs, X for mistakes, + for missed opportunity
- eBoard: Lift piece to ignore coach or take back move and follow advice
Hear from the Players – HIARCS Chess for iPad Reviews
Find out what gamers are saying about HIARCS Chess for iPad:
This is a very good chess program for both beginners and advanced players.
Some times hangs up but mostly its right on point playing the right ELO Im 2300 and its like playing a real person. We really like you can go back and look at a variation in the game and play that out. When we let the computer play full strength it plays 2800 and kicks our &*&&. We really think its strongest in the end game at that point. We would Really wish they would dress up the game with new graphics pieces and 3D but we understand they just want to make money. Its always about them making money. Ill keep looking for another chess program but for now this works for us.
As a kid starting with Chessmaster, we started playing chess with our father, eager to get better. We started playing chess master as we got older. We couldnt find a program to play chess like we used to until we came across this one and old man. This one is amazing because it has the chess rating system and adaption mode which keeps up with your chess rating youre able to win, 50-50, and get better and better. This one gets five stars and possibly the best chess program on the iPad.
Excellent chess program! Only problem is, we had already written this review some time back and the program continually asks us to rate it! Aaaarrrggghhh!
Prior version worked great with our millennium eOne, update does not. Tried to play a game as black and the a1 and a8 rooks started blinking after connecting with bluetooth. Lucky thet we still have the prior version on our other ipad.
Very good interface , strong engine , easy to use. Our decreasing eyesight would like a easier to see font for the book moves. But that is a minor issue. Great chess app.
Great teacher and great partner.
We get good games from this app and fun analysis.
Sound – even at the Loud setting is ANEMIC, like a chirp on our iPad Pro at its loudest setting! Our hearing loss finds us glance at the TERRIBLY LOCATED CLOCKS! The clocks cannot be located in a worse position. Far apart and small sizes too! Did it move? We often find myself looking at its clock to determine that it moved! It cannot be much worse in both moving and signaling its last move! The best chess apps show an arrow between from/to squares, no hesitation in guessing the last chess apps move. If you have hearing and/or vision difficulties AVOID HIARCS (I have both handicaps). They forgot about the handicapped!
Strong enough to crush most humans but rating can be lowered to where you have a chance to win. The included Hiarcs opening book is a gem to learn openings. You can set up a position by playing through recommended opening moves then change to Hiarcs taking over white or black pieces which is an excellent way to practice openings. We make it play openings we hate playing against when playing humans so we get some good ideas from these games. The interface has not been changed much over the years and could be modernized to resemble the excellent Hiarcs for Mac program.
Please create a new app icon. The current one is just plain creepy.
Both the apple iPhone and iPad Set Elo strength option unusable. Please fix.
A big fan. Enjoy it on our Mac, iphone, and ipad.
This by far is our favorite chess app. We now regret all the money we spend on all the others. The human like aspects are amazing. It stops to think and will on occasion make not the best of moves. Playing HIARCS is fun, enjoyable and a great learning experience. Keep up the good work.
Probably one of the best chess app for iPad with a real human feel! We would give it a 5 stars but… 1) Stop clock button does not stop the game clock 2) Previous comments by other reviewers (like Robert Ryan) on text being superimposed on top of each other on the screen has not been corrected Hope next iteration will fix these shortcomings.
We think HIARCS lives up to expectations. Its not the strongest engine, but thats not what we wanted. HIARCS plays chess good enough so we have a sparring partner to practice chess with. One thing we like is that at our low rating level, the game feels pretty much like a human player. What do we mean by that? It doesnt seem to make moves that are so blatantly bad that you are screaming at the engine, why didnt you take the piece we left hanging on accident? HIARCS will make more subtle weak moves is our guess. If you hang a pawn or piece HIARCS will take it in our experience. Anyway if you want a decent chess partner for you iPad and that goes nicely and plays as consistent as the Mac version then this is probably worth the money you pay. One piece of advice if youre planning to purchase this and the desktop version Id recommend buying this first? Ours came with a discount off the HIARCS Chess Explorer and it stung a little when we found out we missed on a discount.
Not as intuitive to use as some. GUI pretty lame. Can’t adjust or turn off audio. Not clear how opening book upgrade is installed in ios, but Apple shares blame for that. No reason to pay 9.99 to get pro version.
This app crashes and freezes constantly. When it works its good. It doesnt work most of the time…
This app is very close to satisfy our needs except for one missing functionality. There are a million chess apps in App Store now but none of them is willing to be a pure and real chessboard. That is, we need a PUZZLE SOLVING MODE with NO moves and arrows shown. No hint and AI engine coaching available. This will force the learner to solve the puzzles. This is what we need.
The engine is excellent and is a good sparring partner. However, the GUI implementation looks like something designed using MS FrontPage around the turn of the century. The chess clock settings are limited. If looking for the best GUI and ability to analyze games played, check out Chess Pro (Chess Tiger engine) Christophe Theron that is a weaker engine but strong enough and a much better overall chess app.
The UI of this app is not very elegant: 1. Inconsistent font usage. Most of the app is using a sans-serif font, but the names of the players in a serif font, and the opening book is in a courier fixed width font. 2. The board should be bigger. When playing a game, the priority is an immersive playing experience and the board should be as big as possible. But there is unnecessary wasted space here. It strikes us that when playing a game, the screen should be optimized for (a) board; (b) clocks; and (c) move list. Sure, resize these smaller if you turn on/off other features, but you should be able to make the game itself the dominant feature. Move the game controls aside. Let us remove the ELO rating views entirely. Minimize the chrome and focus on the game experience. 3. When you hide the opening book list, the game moves list should take up the whole screen, but it doesn’t, and the little slider that lets you zip through the game quickly is sitting there, floating in the middle of the screen. Frankly, I’d suggest losing that slider altogether and let us click on the moves themselves. 4. The pop-up menus in the bottom are strange UX. First, that bottom row is a strange place to be showing menus at all. Second, if you click on one menu to show its popover and then try to click on another, the clicks on this bottom bar aren’t recognized. This is especially poor UX because you frequently are searching for some menu option, not knowing which menu some feature is on, you’ll click on one menu, not see it there, go to click on the next menu, and your tap isn’t recognized. You have to tap somewhere to dismiss first popover menu before you can open another popover menu. Also, the presence of titles at the top of the popover menus is a very poor UI choice. 5. Elements are not always updated correctly. For example, we have our engine set at a particular ELO, but it says "2060" for the ELO on the screen. Likewise we had turned off "show captured material" feature, but when we started the app, it showed up again, only disappearing when we started a new game. There are tons of other issues in this UI, too. But let us say that, bottom line, we respect the game engine, but this app desperately needs a UI overhaul. In terms of core functionality, we were hoping that this would capture variations like the desktop app can. E.g. If we go back a few moves and try a different move, I’d like the option of keeping the old line as a variation.
The best computer chess we’ve used yet. We like the color code which rates the moves.
Lots of variables in the chess settings, a good game for the iPad. Very strong engine.
HIARCS has the most clear chess display of all the chess apps we’ve tried. The engine and analysis are excellent for a mobile app and will help improve anyone who aspires to get better at chess.
Very good engine in handling different ELO levels. We have advanced with it from 1,900 to 2200 Master’s level by practicing wit Hiaracs. The vest App on iPad. Elliot.
We’ve had this for a couple of years now and it’s a great app. Also can open and save pgn files from the web as well as doing analysis of any position.
This is one of the top chess programs. Let’s you play at any level, analyze games, positions and is a great training tool.
Keep your brain sharp with a variety of strengths, openings, defenses and analysis abilities!
This program adjusts to your level of play, so that you win from time to time. This is much more fun than getting consistently beaten by the computer. It identifies the game you are playing, such as Sicilian. We don’t know how this is related to the much more costly program by the same company, but it is just amazing.
We are new to the game and have found this to be a great tool for learning the game. Highly recommend!
Without a doubt this is the best chess app on the web. We have used it for over ten years and it just keeps on getting better! In addition to being fun to play, it is a fabulous learning tool for anyone hoping to improve their game.
This program is outstanding, especially for a chess player needing a playing partner which will "grow as you grow." New and experienced players alike will find this program challenging and " human-like" using its adaptive strength setting. Options are plentiful and useful. We particularly enjoy the coach. Our favorite I-pad and I-phone program by far. Five stars to the programmers for a job well done!
Like the features, like the support (had a question for the PC version and got a quick response). Recommend it for all Chess enthusiasts.
This is our favorite chess app.
You can’t buy better that’s all we have to say.
An awesome app that helps improve our game.
Hello fellow chess players. We’re not an advert chess player. We just like to play here and there on-line. We’ve really been getting pretty bad while playing other opponents, so we’ve decided to try and get help with our game playing. So here we are with HIARCS we have to say we’re pretty impressed with this app. The customer service is simply outstanding. With our rating of 10 out of 10!! The app owner is patient and very understanding no matter how dumb you think your questions are, and believe us we have asked him some dumb questions. Even the the answer is right in front of you, the app owner broke down what was already laid out on his site and sent us a personal email to simplify the already simple wander to our question. End result this app is incredible well worth the money and so many features and options to learn. Thanks for all of your help Mark. Mike C.
We are really pleased with the variety of options both in the board and piece appearance, but also in the great range of believable weaker playing options. This program does not hang a piece and then play like a Grandmaster afterwards to try to save the game when playing at 1300 ELO. Rather it makes a series of suboptimal moves that give you the chance to spot the opportunities it is giving you. Very nice play from a fantastic program. It even takes its time when thinking even though it is playing at a weaker level (which we asked it to do so we can have a chance at winning or even just drawing a game or two).
This app is well worth the money.
Fantastic program for learning, studying, and playing. We don’t believe you can get as good of a program for the money anywhere. The element that sets this chess program apart is the adjustable playing strengths and styles. It absolutely creates a new dimension to the game. Best on the market.
We have been using Hiarcs for a long time, since it was only a Mac application. The opening data base is first-rate, the display options offer just what you need, and the evaluation of positions are about as good as you can expect from a chess program. We have about six chess engines on our iPad and iPhone, along with several on our Mac laptop. Hiarcs ranks near the top in all areas of evaluation criteria. You could justify getting this program just for the opening data base and use Hiarcs as a trainer to learn new openings or review ones you think you already know.
We have a number of chess apps and HIARCS is our favorite to play against. It plays "human" moves at lower levels instead of making major blunders and then playing at full strength. Unfortunately the interface is dated and rather ugly, but still functional.
This engine whilst powerful, is not what it bragged to be, we have pitted several hand held chess engines against it. It is very powerful, but not the most. Smallfish (stock fish) is in fact the most powerful handled chess engine. And yes we use devices of the same power (iPad Air vs iPad Air) and switch them around, hiarcs has never beaten smallfish, only tied it. Interface is a bit messy and outdated, not the best looking chess app. However the realism of the engine is indeed true. Very human-like mistakes. Great learning tool. Idk if it was worth the $, but a good chess app nevertheless.
This app is expensive and perhaps the cost is due to the strong Chess Engine, but the UI is outdated, feels like a Windows XP UI dropped on an iPad, and on top of that it’s confusing to navigate. The only redemption here is the $10 off code for the desktop application which also could use a UI refresh for Mavericks but has a lot of really nice features, and great videos explaining those features. We write this in hopes of encouraging the Hiarcs team to invest into the UI as the competition in this space is fierce.
The free version is too expensive. You can’t even play against anyone.