Show HN: OffChess – Offline chess puzzles app
60 comments
·July 8, 2025laurentlb
Nice project!
As it was not clear from the description, there's a one-time payment (4.29€) to get more than 7 puzzles in a day.
Lichess also offers a good alternative to this, although their offline support is limited.
deepdarkforest
CT-ART 4.0 is the gold standard. Again, not fully free, but it has some very instructional features, like playing against alternate moves, solving mini versions of a puzzle, playing the opposite side etc. Used it for years.
scotty79
To be fair you shouldn't be sitting in the bathroom for that long because you'll develop hemorrhoids.
jaredhallen
TacticMaster on F Droid seems to have all the same features for free.
avadhesh18
A great app no doubt but the descriptive hints on OffChess and a different rating system set OffChess apart from TacticMaster.
kij
Nice, bought to replace 'chess tactics puzzles' the addition of rating changes sold me.
Too late did I notice that there is no share fen button. I use that for harder puzzles when I want to understand why a given solution wouldn't work. Mostly just share to Chessis.
yunwal
Love the app! Would love it twice as much if you allowed me to turn off the sounds (it turns off any existing podcasts or music).
avadhesh18
Thanks for the review, will add a toggle in the next update.
notcrazylol
Thank you and God bless you my friend :)
atakan_gurkan
This alternative: https://github.com/brianch/offline-chess-puzzles is linked from lichess puzzle page.
modernerd
Great start! Gentle feedback:
- Text hints should probably be off by default, they give too much of a hint.
- Auto-advance to next puzzle would be helpful, clicking “next puzzle” gets tiresome.
- Typo in the puzzle categories list: “Egnlish Opening”
avadhesh18
1. I enabled them by default because I thought most people won't even know about their existence if they weren't there but if someone is bothered by them they will definitely find the menu item and disable it.
2. I will add an option to enable auto advance in future update.
3. That typo is embarrassing — thanks for catching it! There’s always something that slips through.
stavros
This is a nice app, but I have one bug report: When I tap on a piece, and it can capture another piece, it looks like it just can't move that way. Capturable pieces should have their background change somehow, to indicate that I can capture them.
avadhesh18
Yeah, that’s more me being lazy than an actual bug. I left it like that assuming most people would figure it out anyway — but you’re right, it’s bad design. I’ll add a border around the "capturable" pieces.
stavros
Thanks, it left me a bit baffled the first time, as it seemed to say I can't capture the piece, when I knew I could. I tried anyway, and it worked, but it was confusing.
Upvoter33
That’s more of a feature request not a bug report
iambateman
This is cool! Is there a chess board library that you used or did you have to built it from scratch?
avadhesh18
I built the board from scratch but used the awesome chess.js library by Jeff Hlywa for move validation.
mansoor_
Can you tell us about the tech stack you used and why?
dan_can_code
great app, I like the adaptive style, but one piece of feedback is that, sometimes it is not clear what the goal is. For example, the language "Brilliant queen win ahead!" tells me, right, I am going to checkmate for the win with the queen in this game. But, actually the puzzle is to instead win the queen piece. "win" in chess to me always means checkmate.
Overall great app.
avadhesh18
I will change the confusing wording like this but for now I can tell you this, if it mentions a piece by name then the puzzle is about winning that piece and not the game. Thank you for trying the app out.
mhitza
I have TacticMaster (available on F-droid) but your app looks more polished and will have to give it a try as well.
avadhesh18
Nice app and props to you for open sourcing it, thanks for your good words about OffChess.
44za12
Cool app. I’ve been thinking of building a similar PWA for a while now, might actually do that.
avadhesh18
Even I thought of first making it a PWA too, the only problem is storage of the puzzles database.
Hi HN!
I'm the developer of rdx, a mildly popular ad-free, privacy and user friendly Reddit client. This time, I made something for a very specific use case: solving chess puzzles with no internet.
Why? Well, my Wi-Fi is terrible in the bathroom—and that's where I do some of my best thinking. I tried printing out “mate in X” puzzles to solve offline, but they weren’t fun without interaction. So I built OffChess.
OffChess is an iPhone/Android app that contains over 100,000 chess puzzles, fully offline and completely ad-free. You can solve puzzles by category (Mate in 1/2/3/4/5, tactics like pins/forks/skewers, or openings like Sicilian/French, etc). You gain or lose points based on how you perform, so there's a light rating system to keep things engaging.
No accounts, no tracking, no monthly subscriptions, no internet required. Just pure, old-school tactical chess training, wherever you are.
You can check out the iPhone/iPad app at https://apps.apple.com/us/app/chess-puzzles-offchess/id67447... or the Android app at https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.offchess
Would love feedback, bug reports, or suggestions.
Thanks!