Last updated on January 4th, 2026 at 09:52 pm
Shredder Chess – Board Game Review
Shredder Chess is a Board/Education/Strategy game from Eiko Bleicher, first launched in 27th March 2009.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 96+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Shredder Chess Stand Out
Shredder, the most successful chess program ever, is now also available for the iPhone. You can play against Shredder, analyze with him and solve chess puzzles. It offers the usual Shredder standard for your pocket.
In addition to the outstanding playing strength of the 12 times computer chess world champion, Shredder is also able to mimic the play of a human chess player with any playing strength. He even deliberately makes typical human mistakes in those levels.
Solve 1000 built in chess puzzles. Shredder keeps track of your performance and offers advice if needed.
You can adjust Shredder’s playing strength from beginner to master level. If you like, Shredder automatically adjusts his strength to yours. He even calculates an Elo rating for you. This is how the playing strength of chess players is typically measured.
During the game a coach is watching your moves and warns you if you are about to make a mistake.
See how you are getting better and better the more games you play and the more chess puzzles you solve.
- Adjustable playing strength
- Intuitive and very easy to operate
- 1000 built in chess puzzles
- See your rating in a diagram
- Outstanding playing strength on the iPhone
- Analyse your games with Shredder, find your mistakes and improve your play
- Coach shows your mistakes
- Different playing styles from passive to aggressive
- Great variety: opening book with more than one million moves
- Enter and analyze any position you like
- Load and save games (incl. names, date, etc.)
- Send games via email
- Different chess boards and pieces
- Support for VoiceOver / Accessibility
- Improve your play whenever and wherever you like
Also check out our highly refined version for iPad.
This Board game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Shredder Chess is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 21st February 2021
Recent improvements include:
Compatibility fixes: in some circumstances the opening book was not visible and the email form was behaving badly.
Download & Availability
Shredder Chess is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Shredder 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:
Any chance of getting an update to support the X and above screens.
This is just a rock solid chess app. The engine is great, there are no silly gimmicks, and the interface is clean with the options youd expect.
UI needs to be updated and needs to be resized. Overall great app. Happy with the purchase.
We absolutely LOVE this app! Shredder is by FAR the best chess app Ive ever used. Its breathtakingly FAST! Using it in aggressive mode is how we like to use it, because it makes every game FUN! Beyond the excitement of each game played that way, we find that taking additional time to study the record of each game solidifies our understanding of what the hell happened A summary of all our experience doing battle with Shredder: among all the best living players Ive ever gone up against even the most accommodating, patient, informative, and generous of opponents none has taught us as much in such an amazingly short time as has Shredder. In aggressive mode, even though we realize its thinking far, far ahead and referring to a huge database of games played by grand masters to prepare itself for each potential move (modifying both its strategy and its tactics along the way), it makes each move so ridiculously quickly that we just pretend Im facing a truly awesome competitor who will still gladly teach us how to weigh the options in any given situation and to think ahead the way he does. Its wonderful! *** Ive enthusiastically recommended Shredder to every chess lover Ive ever known, and each of them has wound up doing exactly the same. Pass it on.
Shredder though getting old is still easily the best chess application in the App Store for iPhone or iPad.
This app is great. The developer has been very helpful, even with minor concerns. It is also accessible to blind people, which is necessary for us. We would recommend this app to anyone.
We like the puzzles, the puzzles vary in difficulty level, so we do not find them too easy or too daunting. We keep on getting hints when we make mistake or we use analysis in the end. We would like some analysis for better lines in addition to the evaluation number.
We love this app. We review all our over the board games right away and save it. Works perfectly on the iPhone.
This is a fantastic chess app – probably the best on the App Store. The biggest problem: we're just really disappointed that you can play only one game at a time. You should be able to play multiple games you can toggle back and forth between. Right now, it's only one game at a time… Which makes it very slow for playing different positions or openings simultaneously. So that makes it a bit annoying to use as a self-teaching app.
Great chess game Ive been using for years. Suddenly theres a bug where after a game the computer says it will increase its rating to the maximum (2600) difficulty, even if we lose. It used to work well and increment based on performance and it was our favorite feature.
Don't waste your time with the puzzle feature,because it's full of mistakes.
Im getting sick and tired of this app. Im a class A player (1800+) and like to play on the app on the rides home. No matter what setting we choose we get demolished at 1800. At the 1700 its too easy. We play live over the board tournaments all the time and rarely (never) do you see 1800 players attack wildly before they even develop. The app gets away with it because it has perfect calculation within a number of plays. If we wanted to play a harder level we would choose 2100+ in the settings. Please calibrate this app. If we wanted to play against a titled caliber player we would not choose the 1800 setting at normal. Other than that the app works fine.
It is great to see that the Shredder development team has continued to support this application. Such continued efforts are the hallmark of quality on iOS, and serve as the gold standard to all prospective developers. Thanks for a great app. Edit: The latest updates have been halfhearted at best. It would be nice to see the developers give this gem the attention and polish it deserves, as we'd love to increase our rating to 5-stars.
How long its gonna take them to add new screens support? Another couple of years? Jee.
Titles as it all: Do we have to pay for the app on every phone.
Shredder is a great trainer, keep up the good work guys.
Shredder is absolutely the best chess app. The fact that Shredder can be set to automatically adjust it's strength after every game makes it the perfect trainer. Puzzles are great challenge too. It could do with a update though ;).
Best chess CPU/learning experience around. Works perfect with new iPhone. Thanks for the app! So worth the money.
Great app, please update for IOS 9 ASAP as the app now crashes.
It quit working recently, so we deleted and reinstalled. That appears to have worked. Good chess app. The best.
We've been using shredder for years on our computer and love it. We're enjoying it very much on our iPhone 6Plus as well! Thumbs way up.
We love this app. However it has many problems and it really requires an update, is difficulty is not really in ordered of strenght as its rating in 1250 is more challenging than 1450, it would be better if they add a solution to this problen in the later update.
We're revisiting our previous 5 star rating on this once Amazing app. It's sad to see that it hasn't received a single update since 2014. It's become more buggy over time and now it lacks serious functions and features :( we hope the developer pays enough attention to this. Thank you.
We don't know what happened with this app. We used it for years and never had any problems. It was our favorite chess application. Now it crashes after ever other use. We have to continually delete and reinstall to make it work. Not worth the price they charge any more.
Since iOS8 if our iPhone is shut off during a game, the app locks up solid & must be reloaded.
Could be 5 stars if all iOS 8.x.x would be solved.
Update: we no longer have access to opening books. When we try to open and view the possible selections for openings, we get a blank page with lines. Openings are one of the biggest reasons why we loved this app and now it's gone. Please fix this ASAP and the app will be perfect again like it once was.
We have iOS 9,we think it the best chess app you can learn a lot from this app (auto rating, ant puzzle ) but it keeping crashing and crashing all time. Do wast your time and money they never try to fix it very good app but very very poor support.
Exceptional when it works. It is very buggy and crashes. We will change to a 5 star once fixed.
Raitings are broken since ios 8 came out – we are ranked 7400+.
While using hotspot , board/menu is not displayed properly and it is not playable. Many apps handle hotspot correctly. Been that way a while now. You would expect a better for a paid app. Chess Genius does it correctly.
It simply won't open after a few uses and we have had to delete it and re-install it over and over.
We've used this app for years now as a casual player. It's wonderful how well it adjusts to your playing level — when it works. As of the latest update, it does not open.
The app crashes using IOS 7. Fix this problem please.
We absolutely loved this app… Until latest update continually makes our elo "4503" and therefore makes Shredder 2600. Needless to say we're not a grand master and we can't use this app anymore without getting crushed. Please fix it and we will update our review.
Simply the best $10 we've ever spent on chess, and we've spent a lot of $$ on chess computers, programs, books etc. Except latest release is just shutting down immediately on our 4s iPhone. When this is fixed we'll glow again about this program. Very ver strong player when it works.
It was good until we opened it and it crashed. 5 stars when it is fixed.
Fonts are blurry and UI is fuzzy please fix.
Still does not play right, even after update.
This is the best chess app that we have tried.
We played chess quite a bit back in high school a few decades ago and we wanted to get back into playing. After trying several chess apps we find that Shredder is our favorite. Not only does it feel fun, we love how it calculates our rating after every game quantifying our progress. After a few days with the lite app we upgraded to the full version.
One of the best we've seen love it. Buy it.
Our favorite feature is the strength meter. Watching how much the needle moves tells you the key pivot points in a game. We've entered games we've played to analyze our mistakes, and we feel it's made us a better player. The chess engine is top notch, maybe not the strongest, but more versatile than most.
It adjusts the difficulty after every match according to your playing strength. We'd love to see a feature for adjusting the puzzle difficulty as well, because some of them are easy and some are really hard.
Really polished, full featured, excellent chess app. No nags, freemium nickel-and-diming or anything like that, just a good solid product.
Mostly flawless. Minor flaw: can't look up opening positions by name. Major flaw: can't play music while running Shredder. Almost lost a star for that one.
This is the best chess app we've ever used! The individual rating system lets one play an even match with the program, rather than getting slaughtered by a powerful computer. Go for it, you'll enjoy its many features whether beginner or genius.
This has been the best way to get back into chess and improve our playing. Also, great support from the creators if needed.
Happy with this app! We recommend.
Best engine for human-like, autoscaling difficulty. Nice interface, lots of well designed features. Easy to export games for later analysis on a pc.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.11.0
- Size: 30.24 MB
- iOS: 10.0 or later
- Languages: EN, DE
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: Eiko Bleicher
Last updated: 21st February 2021 | Genre: Board, Education | Developer: Eiko Bleicher