Really Bad Chess
Experience one of the top-rated Free games on the App Store, Really Bad Chess! Developed by the innovative team at STFJ LLC, this Board game provides a unique gaming experience like no other. With a content rating of 4+, it’s perfect for a wide range of players. Since its initial release on 13th October 2016, the game has seen numerous updates, with the latest version launched on 3rd March 2022.
Are you a fan of Board, Entertainment, or Puzzle games? Then Really Bad Chess is right up your alley! You won’t be able to resist its appeal.
User Ratings of Really Bad Chess
Over 1,545 players have rated Really Bad Chess. Join them and share your thoughts!
How Much Does Really Bad Chess Cost?
Good news! You can download Really Bad Chess on your iOS device absolutely free!
Really Bad Chess Release Date
Eager to know when Really Bad Chess first graced the App Store? It was launched on 13th October 2016.
When Was Really Bad Chess Last Updated?
The latest version of Really Bad Chess was updated on 3rd March 2022, ensuring a more enjoyable gaming experience for all players.
Where Can I Download Really Bad Chess?
To get started with Really Bad Chess, head over to the official Apple App Store.
A Glimpse into Really Bad Chess
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
What’s New in the Latest Update?
Find out what’s new in the latest version of Really Bad Chess updated on 3rd March 2022:
bug fixes
User Reviews on Really Bad Chess
Looking for more information? Read a comprehensive review of Really Bad Chess below:
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 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.
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.:)
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.
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, we’ve 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.
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 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.
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.
There needs to be a better way for users to track their progression though. We love playing but have no idea how much we’ve 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??
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, I’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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ads arent rewarding any undos.
AI is both too good and really bad. The bot seems just like normal AI and not like a chess bot which doesnt allow for realistic chess gameplay. Basic rules like draw by reputation are non existent. We’ve been stuck with only a king where we’ve been chained in a loop of repeating one legal move and the bot just repeats one calculated move instead of finding a checkmate. Plus theres no real consideration in the way that the boards are stacked. Good concept, poor execution.
The game itself is really fun. But the app lets ads run that dont close when you prompt them to. They either force you through three or four pages and videos of a single ad before you move to another app being advertised, or they disable the X button so that it wont respond no matter how many times you press on it.
Great idea abominably executed. Not clear if the paid version gets rid of ads. Ads are very, very poorly produced on top of being intrusive. The menu structure seems deliberately annoying.
We didnt download this game to get slaughtered by an AI with the capability of a grandmaster, which can take all of your pieces in the span of 10 moves.
AI really takes the fun out of it, even at ranking 0.
This app used to be cool but now the ads wont close. Once they come up you have to close the app to reset.
The game is set to a high ai skill so you are forced to use undo. Which has a limited amount of undo. So they try to force you to either watch ads or buy them… So instead of playing wacky chess variants. Its designed to screw you over. Also you cant reset the board… So right away its just another money making scheme instead of an actual game.
So we’ve realized that if anything has your king in check the only thing you can do is move your king, even though its just one piece Vs two, why? Im not good at chess, does that mean that regardless of anything only the king could move if checked, what about the knight next to the piece that is performing the check? We dont know, but this makes the game seems pretty bad then, is chess this bad?
Zach, you made us love chess again for the first time in 40 years. But the ads and the tracking are absolutely unacceptable. You gotta make a dollar, so release a premium version that isn’t an insult to our privacy. We would be sad to delete this – the only – game on our phone.
Download any chess app and play the chess960 or fisher chess mode and it is the exact same. Only difference between that and this app is that this app has ads.
Now does not allow you to use app without giving up more of your personal data.
Long story short for those who may not want to read all of our review, if you are new to chess and saw this game as an opportunity to learn some strategy then just uninstall it and move on. It isnt worth the headache. So let us get this straight. You make a game for people to play chess without having the big intimidating move sets to worry about and instead give us an ai to play against that seems to always perform the best possible move? We wanted this game to teach us how to move, defend, and break through pieces and to the transfer that to regular chess. It seems like a good training tool to get used to using different formations and to learn how adapting can win you games. All this was our expectation. Instead, we were met with a game that places us against possibly the MOST ept chess bot in existence. For example, in one game we were up several big pieces. We had four pawns, a queen, two knights, and a rook against our opponents three nights and maybe three pawns. We LOST. If you give the bot some sort of reasonable give and make it blunder some moves or at least play like a normal person id change this to five stars. Its a great premise, but im unspeakably tired of getting ripped apart by an ai that constantly plays the best move against us, someone who is just getting into chess and cant grasp yet how to move AND defend at the same time.
This game is not a bad idea, but just isnt good. If you really want a fun chess experience that doesnt require preparation or learning, play Fischer random, or Chess 960. That way you can adjust the difficulty of the AI opponent. This game neglects this key feature and makes the game arguably harder than normal chess. Real chess is easier to play for beginners than this because you can play opponents of similar skill levels.
Starts great but around the 40-50 rank, the AI gets a completely unfair set of pieces. Im aware that the point of the game is that lower ranks mean you get better pieces and higher, AI gets better, but it becomes a little favored to AI winning. The AI board will start with almost all bishops in the front row meaning that once the game starts, they can snatch a bunch of pieces in the beginning. Sometimes youll have a piece set up to take that bishop, the AI will just have another bishop to come do the same and its just a bad start and sets you up to lose. Went from rank 70 to 30 because of these AI favored boards. We deleted the game because we lost interest, but if youre interested you can just go to free play and set the rankings to your liking whenever you get stuck :)
After purchase we stil get ads Thai are not pisible to turn of.
Oh no why are the peacs like that.
Growing up our dad and we used to play chess almost every day. It was basically how we bonded. Our dad passed away in 2005 but our love of chess remains. Standard chess is kind of like a classical greek sculpture perhaps a bit TOO beautiful and symmetrical. This game has a great concept of seeding that classical Chess beautiful symmetry with a more modern element of randomness. Its a metaphor for modern life. Just as modern life can be quite random, likewise this game.
We love this game. All the sudden it wont open on our phone. We tried deleting and reinstalling it. Still wont work.
Had our 150 week win streak erased. Hoping developers can correct this. Havent played it since.
This is a really cool idea for the game, but it ends up becoming entirely luck based. The setups of material difference make a huge difference based on how many threats you are able to create, but the most luck based part of the entire game is the engine. The engine you play against is WILDLY inconsistent. It will go from randomly giving you free pieces and making crazy, simple mistakes to finding some of the most brilliant tactics imaginable that no human player could possibly find. If it sees a forced win 20 moves and 5 sacrifices away it will play it without fail, but in the opening it will give away free pieces for absolutely no reason. Your wins will almost always come down to the accuracy of the engines play, and the actual player has very limited influence over the outcome of games.
In the ads the sound always plays over our music and stops the music. In another app. If you could implement a mute on ads or something like that so maybe even our music would go in the background of the ads noise. Thank you good game of music issue would be fixed 10/10.
Really upset that our 86 week win streak reset with the new year to zero. We definitely have not missed a week and despite already beating this weeks puzzle, when we clicked on it, there was no check mark, so we beat it again and then it said win streak 1. Really not happy about that.
The AI is legitimately the worse we’ve every played against. It constantly hangs pieces and doesn’t take pieces that we leave hanging. It doesn’t seem to pay any attention to even the most basic tactics. We understand that it can’t be too hard so it appeals to a wider audience, but it feels like we’re playing against someone who learned the rules of chess only a couple days ago. The poor play from the opponent pretty much removes the need to actually play chess. The whole game is decided randomly at this point–you take a piece and hope your opponent doesn’t see that he can take back. Once you get to higher difficulties, your opponent will pretty much always have some opportunity to win, so it’s left to chance whether he actually sees it or not. All of this makes the game really repetitive and boring. If there’s no need to actually think about the game then it immediately loses the appeal that traditional chess has. I’d love if the game implemented a proper engine, like a lower level of stockfish, to play against instead of whatever it uses right now. We want to feel like we’ve achieved our high score instead of just feeling like we got lucky a couple times in a row.
Everything is weighted in favor of the AI. Starting positions, always having to go first.