Last updated on November 28th, 2025 at 11:50 pm
Really Bad Chess – Board Game Review
Really Bad Chess is a Board/Entertainment/Puzzle game from STFJ LLC, first launched in 13th October 2016.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 1,610+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Really Bad Chess Stand Out
Really Bad Chess is just like chess, but with totally random pieces. Try 8 Knights, 4 Bishops, and 3 pawns — why not?
As heard on NPR's Weekend Edition
5 out of 5 Stars "An essential puzzle experience for anyone even remotely interested in strategy games" – TouchArcade
Whether you play chess daily, or quit just after learning the rules, this small twist will open the door to an entire new world of chess.
——WHATS IN THE “BOX”?
The free version of Really Bad Chess lets you compete vs. an AI in Ranked, Daily, or Weekly Challenges. Improve your skills using the included Freeplay mode. A single in-app purchase unlocks Versus Mode so you can compete against your friends locally! It also removes ads, displays captured pieces, and adds soothing alternate color-palettes to choose from.
——REALLY BAD PRESS
"Makes chess fun even if you’re really bad" – The Verge
"Feels more modern than chess has ever felt" – Applenapps
"Really Bad Chess takes a really bad idea and somehow manages to make it a lot of fun." – Pocket Gamer
"Really good fun" – MacLife
——A WORD FROM THE DEVELOPER
Chess is one of those games I always wished I enjoyed, but its commitment to beauty, elegance, and perfect balance always turned me away. Really Bad Chess removes these boring restrictions and flips chess on its head.
As much as random pieces change the game in some ways, I was really surprised to notice how much the game remains the same, and how powerful some pieces are — you've never truly struggled against a pawn until you've struggled against a pawn in the back row.
For chess pros, Really Bad Chess will give you a new type of challenge — the pieces & the moves are the same, but you'll have to throw out your openings and your understanding of normal patterns of play.
For novice chess players (like most of us), Really Bad Chess greatly opens up the game. Instead of starting by studying openings, in your first games you'll get to discover the joy (and challenge!) of learning how to checkmate.
I hope you have as much fun with Really Bad Chess as much as I did making it.
-zach
This Board game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Really Bad Chess is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 3rd March 2022
Recent improvements include:
bug fixes
Download & Availability
Really Bad Chess is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Really Bad 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:
Really bad chess is really great chess. You get a board each day with random pieces. Sometimes it is fair but usually it will favor you or the computer. You must make the best of whatever you get. We feel like playing this has made us a better chess player.
This game gives you the most anger you have felt playing a mobile game, but winning feels deserved and accomplished. Stupid and addicting 10/10 play it everyday.
Good if you know how to play chess.
This is one of the best pieces of training material Ive consumed, surprisingly. Within three days, playing this alongside regular boring chess boosted our ELO from around 850 to 1050. If youre at a beginner/intermediate level, this game actually creates a lot of teachable moments. At higher levels, you have to approach this game with the goal of making something out of nothing. We believe this is something that is easily translatable to regular chess, and ever since playing a bit of ranked RBC at the 60-80 level Ive noticed major improvements to our chess performance. We went into this assuming it would be a fun mindless arcade game that Id play when bored, but it has surprisingly become invaluable to our chess performance. Not a huge fan of the paywalls, but the devs gotta eat somehow. This game is up on Apple Arcade if you dont want paywalls, which has a 3mo trial for new users, so if you can, give it a try. This game is seriously great if you enjoy chess and want to sharpen your skills.
This app is a great way to play chess and relax while using different combinations of pieces on both sides of the board. Is there a way to use it on a Kindle tablet.
Can you believe the guy who gave a 1 star review because this app Didnt teach him the basics tactics of chess like he wanted it to.? He literally downloaded an app called REALLY BAD CHESS and then complained that it didn't help him learn techniques that he could transfer into traditional chess. Thats literally someone walking around in society with us, voting like every other citizen. We had to give a 5 star because the developer deserves better.
Its really bad! Totally recommend it.
Chess is fun the way it is. In its purest form, its a symmetrical game. But in this variant, youre given a random set of pieces against a computer opponent thats actually beatable for once. We do admit that sometimes the boards are a bit unfair, but thats okay. Im on rank 75 and plan to keep going for a bit. If we were to give advice for this game, itd be this. In levels below 50, always look for bishops aiming at knights, other bishops, rooks, or queens, and immediately take them, even if you may lose your own in the process. When youve ascended to ranks 50 and up, throw all that out the window because youre now at a disadvantage. You may benefit from defending your own pieces and coming up with plans so that your computer opponent doesnt start trading. (Im not a chess expert by any means, but these tricks seem to help us in this variant.) It wont throw you into these higher levels, though. Youll start at rank 15, at a massive advantage, and the game will slowly start to let go as you improve, and even stack the odds against you if you get good enough. You go up ranks for winning, but descend if you lose, and the amount you go down for losing is around 2 or 3, which seems like a lot until you realize that you go up around 5 for winning, so losing a few games isnt the end of the world. Once you break even at rank 50, the daily boards, once taunting you, out of your grasp, are no longer a match for you. And at rank 70, youll no longer be intimidated by the much more difficult weekly boards. We like the weekly boards because while theyre harder, you get unlimited attempts at them (unlike the daily board, where you only get two, making every day a potential streak-breaker.) While playing against an AI opponent is intimidating, as computers have a reputation for absolutely destroying the best grandmasters, the computer in this game is actually very forgiving! It may play extremely well at first, but if you survive long enough, it will eventually let go and give away a few pieces, allowing you to steal the win. But of course, eventually the computer will see a mistake, and will happily take your undefended queen. And while you may have two more, we recommend stocking up on undos, which can take back your last move, and are available in a five-pack at the extremely low price of a 30 second ad. It may be annoying to watch ads, especially since theres a skippable one after every match, but Id recommend just stacking up on undos (theres no limit) by watching ads for long periods of time to save up tons of undos so you dont need to do it for a while. If youre in the middle of the game and suddenly realize you need more, the game automatically saves, so you can take a break to replenish undos, or just close the game and take a break. Its low-commitment, so if some unexpected event pops up, you dont have to resign. When you get back, you can reopen the game and get right back to it. Its the little features that are the best in this game. And Im going a bit off-topic here, but we really love the color of the numbers. Your daily streak, weekly streak, daily board score, and rank are all given a special color, and theres something about it that just makes us inexplicably happy. It starts at green, then gradually cycles through the rainbow, seemingly heading towards red. Its just the right amount of unnecessary but definitely beautiful and welcome decoration in a minimalist game. However, while we have been talking about this game like its the best thing in the world, we do have to say: if youre looking for a flashy game with tons of animations, this isnt it. The pieces move instantly, and theres no checkmate animation. Its more for minimalists who just come to play a new version of chess. In fact, the only way you can really confirm a checkmate is noticing the absence of haptics when you make the move. There are no draws. A stalemated player loses. However, since theres no threefold repetition or 50-move rule, you may end up in a situation where you do need to resign to end the match. There are tons of leaderboards, and while everyone has a chance to reach the top spot, there are many people on the leaderboards, some of which are really great at the game, so expect a long-term steeply uphill battle if youre looking to shove your way up to the summit. One thing we think is missing in this game that we think is important is under-promotion, promoting to a piece besides a queen. While you may want to promote to a queen most of the time in this game, as there are no draws, under-promotion is still a fundamental part of chess strategy, and there are definitely times where promoting to a knight would help you more than a queen, for example. Honestly, Ive been playing chess a lot, and we love the game, but we like to play this variant to freshen things up once in a while, and see chess for what it really isa game.
Why does it only have a 3.8 on the App Store? Is the creator bigoted or something? We're not great at the game, but it's a really fun change-up of regular chess and it's light on memory and processing. It even tells you where you can move whatever pieces you've selected (and when your queen's in trouble).
As soon as we started playing, we loved it! The adds arent annoying at all and the gameplay is really fun! Keep up the good work Zach.
We like chess, we love this version of chess. Its so fun and a lot less stressful for us than regular chess. Highly recommend trying it out.
Im so happy to have found this appI love playing chess, but we started to get sick of all the book moves and the same old openings over and over again. We always like to play with creativity and try to wing it, Ive never tried to memorize any openings or strategies. Unfortunately, this has not taken us very fun in terms of online play. We really liked the concept of this app, and upon playing it we liked it even more. However, there are a few gripes that we have. Mainly: the AI. There have been many times where we have been completely stuck in a back-and-forth with the AI (usually with knights). They put us in check, and theres only one possible move we can make to get out of it, and then they do the same move to put us in check again. The game cannot continue and Im forced to surrender. Not sure if this is something that can be fixed, but we would really like to see this change in the AI in order to avoid getting into this predicament.
We downloaded the game for fun but it is so interesting. The random pieces help us think of ways to win without certain pieces. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. But it is a fun and exciting way of playing chess.
We do love regular chess, but can never find someone to play a casual, non serious game with. This filled that desire and cranked it up to 13. Im so happy to have this silly game.
We live this game but if u hate to lose or dont like being underpowered this game is not for u. Those who are ok with that, good luck.
We love the way the game works we have been a chess fan for a bit but we never really understood it but now the moves just come to us it became so clear.
It's a really good and fun game to play. It gives the hundred year old chess a great twist. So basically, it's a really cool and fun game.:).
Its a good game that lets you have a mini power trip ever time that you get 7 queens in your starting group and it is just like normal chess but harder and easier at the same time. Although we do believe that its not for a simple minded person like us.
Majong is ruining everything. We've played this game for over a year and when we lose, we have to watch an ad for another game; usually Royal Kingdom. Lately "Majong" ads pop up and there is no way out! Even if we agree to download Majong, it still stays in place as a permanent ad on Really Bad Chess! We had to delete Galaxaga yesterday and now it looks like Really Bad Chess is going away, too. Fix this.
Great concept and our skill has improved. However we dislike that an ad is shown whenever we choose try again? After losing. There is a bug that prevents you from going back to the Daily board after you use your two attempts. It is not click-able until you select another board first, go back to the main menu, and select Daily, and a secondary bug occurs where instead of the Daily board, you see the last board you viewed (but it still says Daily at the top.
This is easily one of our favorite games here, from one of our favorite dev. Absolute genius! But recently it has an annoying bug thats effectively stopping us from enjoying the game. Ive reached a very high rank (150+), and at such levels, clicking the ranked mode button from the main menu becomes very laggy. The app freezes for quite a few seconds before loading the game, if at all. If we repeatedly surrender and get to ranks below 150, the loading time becomes < 1s again. This behavior is consistent across our iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Please, Zach, if youre still maintaining this game, it would be fantastic if you look into this. Thank you.
Hasnt been updated for two years. We had a 342 day streak going but the ad froze up, and after a restart it said we had no attempts left. Now the ads freeze up often. Frustrating.
Love the game, however in ranked mode we played our first game and lost(first time playing) but the game won't end and we are stuck in a constant loop and can't play any more ranked games, which we would very much like to, overall very fun game.
Removes knowledge about openings , positions from a matchup with others. Levels the playing field.
Why cant a player undo a checkmated move instead of the game simply ending.
Love the game, have made it to like 85 or so in ranked, around which you really need to get lucky and for the computer to make dumb moves. The concept is great and is a breath of fresh air. The dailys are why we give this game a 4 instead of 5. They are fun and sort of bread and butter but in no universe should the computer be making moves that leave open the possibility of a 3 move checkmate when you have pieces galore. It seems that many people have realized you can bait the computer into making incredibly dumb moves by offering a free piece for capture when the move that does it allows checkmate by other pieces. Anyway, its still a lot of fun.
We love this game so much. We do have one issue with it. Black will continuously loop the same check positions when white only has one option to get out of check, getting out of check allows black to check white again, the only possible move for white sets white back to the previous square, setting them up for the previous check. Thus, white is stuck moving between two squares indefinitely. After the same moves are repeated a few times, we'd expect the program to detect lack of progress and either try another move (as in a real-life game) or end the game (as the app does with stalemates). Thanks.
Fun to play. You can get stuck going back and forth with the king and AI, and never draw, so it gets 4 stars. This is because as a chess player, we still expect that convention.
We really like this game, and the fact that it does not force too many ads. We understand you need to pay to play multiplayer (Mr Gage needs to put food on his table) but we would really really love it if along with local multiplayer, online multiplayer would be added with the ability to construct your own starting position to play against each other too.
You are getting the maximum experience if you dont know how to play chess and just random putting your pawns somewhere and capturing enemy pawns until you win! The only thing we dont like its that there is a full version. We personally recommend the Apple Arcade version.
There needs to be a better way for users to track their progression though. We love playing but have no idea how much Ive improved and the app could definitely have a little section that just keeps track of your history of wins and losses in each rank. That would make us play even more because Id feel more motivated as we see our ranking improve.
Ive play this game/app for years, and notice as of recently, users dont get five undos for watching an ad. Instead, the ad runs, and users cant close out of the ad. Ive tried multiple times and do not receive credit for watching the ads. Please fix.
When playing the computer, it will occasionally enter an infinite loop of one or two moves where it is impossible to checkmate but can keep you in check. There needs to be a draw or restart in this situation else the computer will go forever.
Our side always has more queens than our opponent if we are supposed to be equal equally; sometimes we will have five queens and a bunch of pawns against a huge number of middle pieces, which actually puts us at a severe disadvantage. Otherwise, there are very few pawns, and they are often on the back row, which is annoying. Currently we prefer chest 960, although if he fixes those couple problems, we will prefer this.
Nice concept. But it needs a stalemate option. We are playing a game against the AI and down one piece and a pawn. The AI and we keep repeating the same move. We wont break the pattern because then we will loose. And the computer for some reason isnt breaking the pattern. This should be a stalemate. Otherwise the game goes on forever.
Fun concept, terrible execution because of the AI. The AI moved its king out super aggressively last game and we were able to checkmate it. We had no attack on the king and it just came marching to the middle of the board while it had 5 queens on the back rank. The AI is dumber than stockfish lv 1. Im obviously not asking for highest level stockfish, but the AI needs to be somewhat competent and try to win for chess to be fun.
Its a fun game, but the ads are way too long.
Really upset that our 411 day win streak reset to zero today. Please someone, save our records of well over a year of consecutive daily wins. Great game, but this is a fatal flaw.
NEEDS A STAIL MAIT OPTION INSTEAD OFF REQUIRING YOU TO QUIT.
Its very annoying when we have to resign the game because the bot just keeps repeating moves, in a way that forces us to repeat moves. Very annoying that the game has to end there.
If your a good chess player like us we would not play this if we knew what it was if your new to chess play it because its funny but it hurts to see that we get 7 queens and 1 pawn when we try to play an opening.
While the game is innovative and challenging overall, its no-draws policy creates a cheat, whereby the Al can have no hope of checkmating the player, but if it's able to cause the same moves to repeat over and overwhich would result in a draw in regular chess to discourage such obnoxious behaviorthe game goes into an endless loop which can only be ended by resigning. This feels more like sloppiness than a feature you're supposed to watch out for, more like you've been cheated than beaten. We dont know what else to call it when a game in which the same rules theoretically apply to both sides has an element that can only be exploited by one side, as the AI can do this to the player, but the player cannot do it to the AI.
Really? It's a pretty basic accessibility feature. Paying for different color themes would be one thing, but no option to have anything other than a stark white background at all times? We like the game, but we can't play it 90% of the time because of this, so we guess there's no point wasting our storage space with it.
A fun game until you get to around 70ish on ranked mode then it is not possible to win. Even if you kill everything other than a king and one special piece it will just keep moving until it finally wins.
The concept is fun, but theres no way to change the actual skill of the AI. Its very agressive and makes it frustrating. The ads are also very extreme and go on forever. They constantly try and get you to click on stuff and force you into an interactive mini game. The ads make it almost unbearable tbh, so irritating.
The ads arent rewarding any undos.
Hey Zach, if two kings are the only pieces left on the board the player does NOT lose. It is a draw. Really bad chess :) As others have said, your AI is objectively way too hard. Sometimes the board of pieces is even against the player with how it lays, then killer AI strikes with perfect moves every time? Who wants to play a sadist? Not fun. This game was great until it wasn't, unfortunately, as it is a wonderful idea.
Enjoying the game however the fun of beating a level is disrupted by the screen going dark. We wish you had more time to revel in the victory and review the final stage of the board. Whats the point of getting a checkmate if you literally dont even get to look at it?!?!? When you get a checkmate, you should be alerted you win but you can still look at the board and revel in your victory until you decide to finish.
At higher rank the game becomes tremendously unfair. Im at rank 109 and the new board is set up this way. AI: 6 queens (yes, 6!!!), 1 rook, 6 knights and 2 bishops. ME: 5 knights. 2 rooks, 3 bishops, 1 rook and 4 pawns. One more bishop and rook doesnt balance things out against SIX QUEENS. Whats the point of even playing? Bobby Fischer couldnt win this game.
This app is way too infested with ads to be enjoyable.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.4.7
- Size: 91.42 MB
- iOS: 11.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: STFJ LLC
Last updated: 3rd March 2022 | Genre: Board, Entertainment | Developer: STFJ LLC