Last updated on January 17th, 2026 at 05:26 pm
SocialChess • Online Chess – Board Game Review
SocialChess • Online Chess is a Board/Strategy/Social Networking game from Woodchop Software LLC, first launched in 29th June 2011.
It’s rated 12+ and currently has 6,912+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes SocialChess • Online Chess Stand Out
A polished, full featured way to play chess against friends or random opponents online. Play fast chess with a clock, or play many correspondence games at a time making moves whenever you have a chance every day or so.
"Social Chess Is The Best Way To Get Your iCheckmate On" -CultOfMac.com
DESIGN PRINCIPLES
- No Advertisements!
- Beautiful, clean, intuitive layout.
- Features are chosen and implemented carefully.
- Your privacy is respected. We will not spam or share any user info.
- Game features are driven by your feedback.
GAME FEATURES
- Statistics – ELO Rating, Wins, Losses, Draws.
- Elo Charts & Per Opponent statistics.
- Advanced features such as Conditional Moves and Premoves.
- Receive push notifications when a game is updated.
- Play even when there is no internet connection. Moves are sent later.
- Play up to 5 games at a time, or increase it to 100 with In-App purchase.
- Search for opponents by username, email, or we'll match you with a random opponent.
- Claim Victory if opponent does not make a move in the time allowed.
- Optional Takeback move.
- Chess960
- Analysis Board to work out your strategy.
SOCIAL FEATURES
- User Profile including picture, comments, etc.
- Map view of your opponent's location.
- Chat and Group Chat
- Browse your opponent's games, and their opponent's games.
- Elo Rankings
This Board game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, SocialChess • Online Chess is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 12th January 2026
Recent improvements include:
- bug fixes and improvements
Download & Availability
SocialChess • Online Chess is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get SocialChess • Online 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:
No ads. We wish there were apps this well-made for everything.
We enjoy this game and social chess has been a wonderful way to connect with our brother in Colorado.
We have been playing on this app for over ten years so obviously we must like it!! But we do have a complaint that definitely needs to be addressed. The chat needs to be monitored closer for abusive language and racism from sore losers!! We have been called the N- word an alarming amount of times, so many in fact that we hide our profile just so we can enjoy the game that we love so much. We are not the only one that is alarmed by how rampant the racism is on this app and just want the developers to do something about it immediately if not sooner.
The game is great. It has a strategy planning option where you can plan & strategize your moves and your opponent moves. This will definitely improve your game. We highly recommend Social Chess.
Great app! Even better customer support.
Ive been playing for month the interface needs serious updates and the tactile can make u make a wrong movement if u r not careful, we play in two different devices and it happens the same, ip16 pmax and iPad Pro 5th its not a device problem, more than once Ive made the wrong movement because of it.
We love the feature where you can request a take back on your moves.
We love this as a free app. Gives you 5 games to play with all the bells and whistles. Really awesome. The developer has made it better and better over the years alway being our favorite place to play chess. We like it better than chess.com because the players are real and you can always find a player to play with all over the world. Great APP 5***** for sure.
This is one of the better online chess games. However the servers are so variable in regard to speed in bullet games. One time you will be someone with 15 seconds in the clock and the next game lose by 15 seconds. After 5000 games it becomes really obvious. If they could correct that it would be a 5 star.
We (Heart) Love this app, paying member for years now:).
This is absolutely the very best chess site we have ever played. It is good for the experienced player, excellent for the average player and recommended for the new players. It is especially good for anyone who is either too afraid to play with the chess clock or cant dedicate the extended time required for normal competitive chess.
We enjoy all aspects of the app.
Buena aplicacin de ajedrez,Solo quedan algunos detalles por arreglar.
We are enjoying playing SocialChess online however there are some things we cannot figure out. How do we delete a game? How can we count to our wins and losses? Lori Mogan.
Its exhausting Ive played over 4,000 games on this app since 2017. The app itself is great. Happy with game play and features. But we will no longer pay for membership when renewal comes up if the developers of this app dont get better at ending games that have been abandoned. We would guess the average % of abandonment is > 10% maybe even closer to 20%. Theres nothing more frustrating than to be midway through a game, your opponent blunders & loses there Queen or are 1 move away from checkmate, and they (cowardly) abandon the game. Theres a little green light that lights up if the player is online, and when they close the app, the green light disappears. Cant control how players play, but the app can certainly improve by better catching these abandonments quickly. Its absurd to have 7 minutes left on the clock, they log off and abandon, and the app doesnt auto abandon the game until 5 minutes goes by. We really enjoy this app and have avoided switching over to chess.com app or similar – but if this doesnt improve Ill be finding an alternative. Our time is valuable and Im not going to waste it because the app devs cant figure out a better system. Rating it 3 out of 5 stars. If we see improvement, Ill update our review to reflect the changes.
We renewed our one year subscription in January and still have no stats or any benifits. We even double paid thinking we never actually resubscribed, but we want to know if anyone else has had this or if we can get in touch with someone to fix this because the app before this is better than any other. But until then Ive stopped completely for good reason. Id love to come back but not if Im being robbed. Thank you.
Recently, two games that we have played, and our opponent timed out, we have not been able to declare victory even after several days past the expiration. It only gives us the option to resign. We wish this could be fixed. Thank you for many many hours of pleasure. Please have a look at this issue.
Why am we being penalized for refusing games sent over by invite ? Its counting towards cancelled games and making us wait minutes before playing again. AND we have a paid account. What gives.
Since the changes, we cant open SocialChess…… We were playing every day with people all over the world!!! Had 8 games in progress. Upgrades are usually Downgrades authentyx2018@ gmail.com.
Developer keeps making the app worse on purpose. In the most recent update, Social Chess no longer respects your phone being on silent! Apple should boot them from the App Store for being malware.
The best game on the market ,is there a way to add tournament play.
Played a few times but having to deal with abusive chat (ironic because the idea is to play and communicate) makes investing time and effort unappealing.
We always used this app to play chess offline with our wife. They removed this feature, so now we have to be online and play over wifi with two devices. Ruined our favorite chess app :(.
One day you log in and youre beating top rated players. The next day, unstoppable difficulty randomly from 1300 level players.
Its their fault or Apples fault! But they locked us out of our account because we signed up for $9.99! There was an issue but their support fixed it! Thanks.
This app has a lot of hackers who hack into the servers. Ever since we downloaded this app we started getting scam phone calls, most of the time in the middle of a game right as we are winning. These hackers will disconnect you from the server taking several seconds off your clock all so they can win the game. We know its pathetic but thats what they do. We would never again download this app or any other chess app for that matter as theyre all likely run by hackers.
No ads and doesnt constantly shove their annual subscription in your face which theres is actually reasonably priced chess.com is insane like 70-90$ compared to 10 only down side is that there are no puzzles but for playing chess great app.
No idea who is spamming 5 star reviews for this horrible app. You will not find any serious players here. Its like they took the worst ideas from all the chess sites and mixed them into one. Not only will you encounter cheaters in blitz you will get timed out for running your clock. Also no analysis. You cant even send a game youve played by email unless you pay these cretins. This app is completely useless.
Ever single person on this app uses chess engines and bots to cheat. It is absolutely ridiculous. We are a US master and get destroyed by every user including low rated players. Just stay away from this app so they close this crap down. Garbage idiots like these people have to ruin everything. Its not just this app either its the majority if not all apps. Its funny how they are super grandmasters when using the app but in person at tournaments they loose ever game you know who you are.
We play SocialChess on Android and PC but the iOS version will not login to our account.
Ban folks citing abuse for merely responding to abuse. Bias Not banning folks for clear abuse accompanied by evidence. Hypocrisy Responding politically to reasoning request or not responding at all. Both.
Ok. So we have had this app for a while on both android and iPhone. Paid version for each. When we first got it the play was fluid, which was important because we only play 1min blitz. Then two things occurred. First, there are not that many players anymore. More importantly though, and we dont know if it is an update or what, but it literally skips multiple seconds at least one or two times per game. We mean there is literally never a time in blitz where it takes us 3 or more seconds to make a move. Yet nearly every game we go back and check the time clock and it happens often twice which messes the game up. We are moving over to another app which we have been using that has more players and less lag.
Ive been enjoying the free version of this app for over a year but wanted to challenge ourselves and break out of the monotony with chess960 or whatever is called that would allow us to play a game with pieces at random , this was the only reason why we payed the full price , for our surprise is not working at least not on our iPad , so we feel robbed , hopefully is a bug soon to be fixed.
During a very drawn out but enjoyable game with a friend, the game was deleted WITHOUT WARNING for our taking a month to make a move. While we understand taking such time between moves is rare, the app should have been designed to WARN the player a few days before deleting the entire game.
We have internet connection and every time we play a game we lost connection and makes us lose time and that not funny at all.
Five stars because out of all the apps Ive found this is the best free online chess. However the analysis feature is embarrassingly horrible. If you had a better chess engine it would make it easier to analyze past games.
Other apps try to do to much. Social chess is polished and works great. Joy to play with.
Excellent, aesthetically pleasing app. Best Ive seen appearance wise. Allow for everything from classical to blitz chess. The blitz and rapid chess are where the ios version of chess.com disappoint. Not an option at all, though great for many other things. Where Social Chess could improve a bit are making a few of the features more intuitive. For instance we havent been able to even find their analysis function at all. If anyone can point the way there that would be much appreciated. We definitely recommend checking Social Chess out. See you in there.
This is a fun game that is easy to use. When we had issues that needed assistance from customer support they were very quick to respond and extremely helpful. They resolved our issue within minutes, not days like some apps do. This is a highly recommended game for any chess player at any level. Go and give it a try for yourself and your friends.
Paying member herepgn export no longer works, and app freezes and crashes constantly now. Feels abandoned wont be renewing unless these issues are addressed.
Biggest flaw of this app is the pre-move function!! Players can pre-move their chess piece before the opponent moves his or hers, so if you play 1 min game, lots of players manipulate the clock by using the pre-move function, just so they can move 10 moves and the clock only goes down 0.1 second. Towards the end of the game, its just a whole bunch of pre-moves that dont make any sense just to preserve time. Its not even playing chess anymore, just pure manipulation of time. No real world chess games are like this, definitely not in the professional chess tournaments. Can you pre-move in real life lol? Its the most stupid thing ever. Everyone in the 1 min game uses this trick but its pure stupid and unfair to those that dont know about this and just simply want to play chess. We see why many people are frustrated with this app and said lots of cheaters here. Probably because they use the pre-move function. Hope they delete this function.
This app is not very begginer friendly we got this app because of no ads and we thought that it would be a cool hobbie to learn but there are not many begginers on this app. We used the find player or whatever its called to find new players, we played with the lowest elo on the leaderboard and still lost we mean this app just is very not fun because we cant start.
As far as a chess app, this one is great. Probably our favorite over the other 6 we have on our phone. Ive had it for years but we use it less and less because we cant seem to go one day without someone calling us monkey or the N-word when they lose to us. Theres no option to report people, instead you can only block. Nowadays its harder and harder to find an opponent because we have so many racists blocked. Just use Lichess instead.
We keep getting INVALID_Key and the system will not let us creat a new account.
Can't get past the sign in screen.
Unfortunately there are a lot of cheaters on this platform! For example, dont play with this person called mistermaster from Iran who has elo score around 2174. He has software that can freeze his clock. We had this one game with him, he had 0.9 seconds when we had 28 seconds left, and we moved at the same speed. His 0.9 seconds never went down for many moves! It kept glitching and glitching and stayed at 0.9 seconds for a while. That is impossible with human physics. At the end of course we lost due to time because apparently having 28 seconds cannot beat someone with 0.9 seconds. Our whole 28 seconds went to 0 while his 0.9 seconds lasted till the end, and he had 0.1 second left (how convenient lol). If anyone watches that game, they would call that absolute bogus. We hope the developer can ban this cheater. We notice that some people also cheat with computer, every move is literally using the same time like he doesnt think lol, extremely consistent like a robot. Im sure many players met with those before. We reported one because we played about 20 games with that person to prove it. Of course next day we saw his account get banned ha! Feel great when cheaters get punished. Honestly it really took all the fun away when there are people like that. Come on, the whole point of chess is to have fun and play fair.
This game is terrible it has a pay wall when you reach five games a day we hate it this is the worst game ever.
Id rather play checkers than use this app anymore. They charge $8 a year to play more than five games at a time ( like that is some kind of engineering feat on their part ) GROAN .
We LOVE THIS APP SO MUCH BUT THEY BANNED ME NO MATTER HOW MANY ACCOUNTS we TRY TO MAKE IT WONT LET ME PLAY.
We still love this app but we were deeply angered by the new rule of being able to change your name every 30 days. You should be able to change it whenever. That gives 1 star from us.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2026.01.0
- Size: 87.68 MB
- iOS: 15.0 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory: Infrequent/Mild Mature/Suggestive Themes, Infrequent/Mild Profanity or Crude Humor, Infrequent/Mild Sexual Content and Nudity
- Developer: Woodchop Software LLC
Last updated: 12th January 2026 | Genre: Board, Strategy | Developer: Woodchop Software LLC