Last updated on February 5th, 2026 at 07:11 am
Play Magnus – Play Chess – Board Game Review
Play Magnus – Play Chess is a Board/Entertainment/Strategy game from Chess.com, LLC, first launched in 25th February 2014.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 3,990+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Play Magnus – Play Chess Stand Out
Play and learn chess with the World Chess Champion, MAGNUS CARLSEN, today!
You can also play chess against his Grandmaster friends like Wesley So, World Fischer Random Chess Champion, and Judit Polgar, the greatest women chess player of all time.
Discover their stories while you challenge them at different ages. Expect some tongue-in-cheek banter during the games. Unlock achievements and earn rewards for playing.
Expect more Grandmasters to be introduced regularly, providing you with a fresh yet diverse chess experience.
A CHESS COACH IN YOUR POCKET
You can learn chess too, as we provide you with helpful hints in-game, take back pieces when errors are made, and use the Magnometer tool to guide you on the right and wrong decisions in the game.
To become the best, you must train with the best. Nothing feels better than having World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen sit next to you and assist with your chess improvement. After walking you through the basics, Magnus starts sharing strategic tips and tactical tricks. Whether you aspire to become a Grandmaster or merely want to win your next game, his advice will prove invaluable to you. Also, expect to flex your mental muscles, as active learning is the key to success!
CONNECT WITH FRIENDS
Get detailed statistics on your performance. See how well your friends do and share your memorable games with them. Unlock achievements. Track your rating.
WANT MORE CHESS TRAINING?
Try our other award-winning app, Magnus Trainer, to get even more chess coaching from Magnus Carlsen himself. It’s a superb way to master chess with the reigning World Champion!
Or, if you are an ardent fan of solving mind-boggling chess puzzles, make sure to check out Tactics Frenzy – another app developed by a team of world-class chess experts led by Magnus Carlsen.
This Board game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Play Magnus – Play Chess is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 10th January 2022
Recent improvements include:
General bug fixes and improvements.
Download & Availability
Play Magnus – Play Chess is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Play Magnus – Play Chess 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:
This app is so fun and challenging. We are doing our best to defeat Magnus at age 12 and hes just too good. Highly recommend for chess players of any level.
We've been playing Chess since high school. This is a fun app. Love it.
Thank you for putting together such an amazing app. Great work. Its a lot of fun to tee this up and just actually play a game thats relevant and not mind wasting having to think and training your brain is important in life so good work.
Oh Yeah, Chess Is Good & Fun, Nothing Stops us From Playing Chess With Magnus. It Is Play magnus.
We're pretty young so we're not very good yet but it's really good for building your mind and really fun to.
You could learn from the best. This app even has a pink that could send you to a chess training app, that you dont have to pay a single penny. Also it has different age gaps, ever wanna play a 13-year old Magnus Carlson you could. Overall its the best chess training app on the AppStore, and the second best chess app.
This game is great for those who dont play chess much.
Most apps of this kind are hidden behind a paywall, but with the free version you can: a) challenge Magnus at each age except 30, b) challenge Judit Polgar at 5, c) learn opening theory and other topics from Magnus himself. Great companion to Magnus Trainer.
You may play Magnus. But can you Best Magnus.
Anyone else experience the app crashing when opening the app and going back to a game already in progress.
This game is not only fun, but It also helps you get better at chess. There are no adds what so ever, and Its free! We would highly recommend this game to anyone. You should give a shot, and if you do, we bet that youll love it.
We have played many chess apps. This one is the best. Fun and easy game play when you want it and more complex when you want a challenge. The video lessons are well worth the modest subscription fee.
Good game. Works well. Playing Magnus is overall fun. But we like the learning feature the most.
Us encanto la aplicacin es genial.
Its great. Im going to say he is extremely difficult at the age of 6+. He is extremely smart too. If Magnus reads this tell him (or if he dont tell him also) we said Im a huge fan and to friend us on chess.com our username is CotttonSmit10. Thanks.
Great app but Im not a fan of the colors.
Best in all respects. Highly recommend for ALL ages and strengths.
Awesome app, we recommend it. We thought we were good at chess, but this is amazing. We love it and want to get better at chess.
We're a horrible chess player but we keep playing and it's a nice relaxing game with a lot of mental energy.
This game is absolutely magnificent, and we would pay 15 dollars to play this game if we needed to. Absolutely fascinating.
Best chess game ever it got us better at chess.
Im relearning chess, never been more than adequate. Playing Magnus at various ages is really cool, though we can barely beat him at 7 years old (wow dude, youre good). Our 6 year old is now into the trainer app as well.
This game like we said in the title is great!its very VERY helpful and effective for learning!if we could change 1 thing is that theres more helpful hints without it costing too much money so its a bit easier to learn other than that its amazing!thankyou for making this game.
We love this app and we think its great and all but we think it needs more nonmember videos besides the ones already there because we are an advanced player and we dont want to keep watching looking in the right place thank you.
We bought the subscription and when we try to watch a video the sound does not work we have tried everything to fix it but it still does not work.
We can beat Magnus at 7 1/2 yrs old.
Great app. Humbling playing against 7 year old Magnus and getting beat most of the time. Tried to get the training videos, however, there is no audio. Otherwise app is 5 stars.
There is a sudden crashes in the game.
We love the app and Magnus Carlson. Just when Im ready to buy the subscription we hit a snag. The app keeps crashing for some reason. We updated our OS and that didnt fix the problem. Please update this app because updating iOS only succeeded in making it crash even more. Fix it.
We gave this app a three because while it doesnt fail its hard to follow magnus moves while hes kicking your butt.
We love this app and Magnus is by far the greatest chess play of all time in our opinion, but he really needs to make a lot of features free. If we want an app, we wanna actually be able to play all the bots on that app. Please make the new levels cheaper on BrainPower. Same thing with KnightRunner, just too many things are not free. Its cool that its free to download but just hear us out. Good app overall but aint no way Im paying that much AS A SUBSCRIPTION to play against chess bots when we can go to good ol Chess.com and play ur 30 yr old bot for free.
Most training modules are buggy (wont play or missing audio) and the training does little to prepare you for the higher levels. The biggest challenge is that levels one and two are too easy, and then the app goes full level eleven on the Wesley age 10. The app needs to help by providing tips and helping to build multi move strategies, but instead it takes all the algorithm constraints off Wesley and you cant learn progressively. So we have cancelled the sub and moved on to more teaching-biased models.
The app is very buggy as well as the other Magnus apps. We only find consistency with the Magnus trainer. This app freezes up and will not open when we click on it. The knight runner is a mess. If this app worked better we would give it a 5.
We enjoy being able to play against magnus-bot, but this app crashes constantly. Ive honestly never used an app that crashed more. We hope the developer gets automatic crash reports because we just submitted about 20 in the last half-hour.
The lessons and chess are first rate, but the membership is completely glitchy and the app crashes often. Very hard to make progress it loses where you are all the time. We have probably joined a dozen times trying to get it to find our membership. Get it together.
We paid for a years subscription a few days ago and still dont have access to the locked features advertised. Ive tried logging out and re-installing with no results. Filed a trouble-call complaint with zero response. Chess is fun, but we want what we paid for.
We cant buy the membership, when we click on it, it doesnt load anything.
You download something like this and you think youre gonna get a really premium experience but the graphics on it are terrible that we guess the computer like mind of Magnus only thinks in black-and-whiteAnd gray which are the default settings for the board and the pieces. Its really hard to tell the difference between the pieces. Its like a nonstarter.
This is one of the most annoying chess apps to play against. No rating, do you have no idea what youre up against. The program is way too strong tactically. We deleted is several times. We decided to try it again after a long break during which we used other programs, and deleted it again. Avoid.
Ive had this app since release and its unplayable at this point. Even if you do make it through a game it will crash immediately after.
We have been playing this game since August of 2017. We used to play it daily. Now the app will not even open. It crashes every time.
They show downloading and even after days they are on the same status. You cant download another video while one gets stuck and you cannot cancel it or delete the progress. So you pay and cannot access the videos. The support just ask obvious questions like is your internet speed enough? Is there enough memory on your iphone/ipad? And they conclude that they cannot help, and promise to answer later, which is not happening after weeks.
Cool app, love the different difficulties and Magnuss age descriptions, but good grief we cant play this app for more than 5 minutes without it crashing now. Not sure what the deal is, but it needs a fix.
Two problems: 1. Every time we beat Magnus, the game crashes. 2. We play an opening we developed over decades that is very difficult for humans to beat, but rather easy for chess engines to exploit– we routinely beat 2200 players over the board, but usually draw or lose to 2400 players. Magnus at age 9 is easy, but at age 10 is unbeatable for us because it plays like a chess engine (which it is). Our point here is, that despite the little descriptions, you're clearly not playing anything remotely like a human. We also find Magnus' descriptions to be very conceited / cocky, which is a bit of a turn off to the game. Do we really need to know he was captain of his 10 year old soccer team? Our son was offensive player of the year in soccer in high school, had a 1590 SAT, and was accepted to Berkeley– there.
The in app purchases that we bought years ago only work on one device and with the last update we lost the upgraded Chess pieces. It is VERY HARD to distinguish genetic pieces from the chess board during play! – Update – we deleted the app after using it for years, if you cant see the pieces you cant play the game! We will use one of the MANY chess apps that we own and enjoy as well as our electronic chess set. Money Grab.
We played against the 2th one and we were FORCED to lose our queen because we were being tricked into killing a X moving thing and we didnt want to we wanted to go back but the game did not let us to go back to some where else and it forced us to get the piece and Im really annoyed please fix this.
After downloading, installing, deleting and trying again multiple times, we just gave up. Would not even start up.
This app has really helped us improve our chess skills playing against the best chess player in the world.
We been on and off chess apps for a long time. Yahoo chess was originally for a long time strictly off their multi player (online) mode. But Magnus took over Bc u dont have to hope u get a decent opponent to play with. Depending on his age.. U gonna put some respect on the 10yr old Magnus For chess player that like see where they @ And rank themselves .. This the truth Im very competitive so this game for us! Beside maybe graphic and universal ranking U cant upgrade this much, it already, for real Ty for ur time.
The incessant, constant barrage of requests to set up a monthly payment is annoying, and ultimately kills the experience of trying out this app. Yes, its brutally hard, and sure, it tells you it has some nice features, but you cant even change the color of the board without forking over cash – EVERYTHING is behind a paywall. A timed trial with most or all of the features enabled would be FAR more enjoyable, and probably would gain them a lot more paying customers. As it stands, Im not subscribing on the hope that the paid features are worth it, and the 1% of the game we can access for free isnt enough to justify us keeping it. Deleted.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 5.1.53
- Size: 259.99 MB
- iOS: 9.0 or later
- Languages: EN, FR, DE, IT, NB, RU, ZH, ES
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Chess.com, LLC
Last updated: 10th January 2022 | Genre: Board, Entertainment | Developer: Chess.com, LLC