Free
$0
- Unlimited play against the engine, 1400 to full strength
- Unlimited online games over Game Center
- Five tactics puzzles a day
- Five Rush runs a day
- Five each: positional, endgame, Guess the Elo
- No advertising, ever
Arte Soft presents
BrassPawn
The training half of getting good.
Tactics · Judgement · Endgames · Rush · Guess the Elo · Play · Online
Reel one — the engine
Stockfish, compiled in, running on your phone.
Not a server that answers when it feels like it. The strongest chess program there is, on the device, offline, at full strength — grading every move you make while the game is still going.
Reel two — the library
Fourteen thousand positions that all have a point.
Every puzzle has exactly one answer and no branches. Every endgame label was checked against a deep search rather than remembered. A trainer that teaches you something false is worse than no trainer.
Now showing
No account. No adverts. No tracking.
The engine runs on the device itself, and nothing about you is sold, shared or followed.
The premise
Nothing will make you a grandmaster on its own. What this gives you is the training half of it — structured, measured, and honest about where you actually are.
Most chess apps are a puzzle feed with a rating attached. This one is built around a different idea: that improvement comes from being told, immediately and specifically, what you missed and why it mattered — and from being asked the same question again a week later, before you have quietly forgotten.
So every mode grades you while you are still in the position, in words about the position. Not “−1.4”, but the rook belonged on the open file, and now it never gets there.
Today · on the top boards
The day’s games, and where they turned.
The finished games from the biggest events, each with the move Stockfish says decided it. Open one in Brass Pawn to replay it and take the position over.
Romanian Team Chess Championships · Men’s Super League · Round 6
Mate with a pawn, a rook down: Martirosyan finishes Adhiban with 46...g5#
Adhiban 0–1 Martirosyan
ACS Superchess, five wins from five, beat third-placed ACS Arnia Chessit 4½–1½ in round 6 of the Romanian Super League, and on board one Martirosyan mated Adhiban with a pawn: 46...g5#.
Romanian Team Chess Championships · Men’s Super League · Round 6
Neither clock had four minutes: Sadhwani beats Anton in 40
Sadhwani 1–0 Anton
GM Raunak Sadhwani (Vados IFB Finwest Arad, 2645) beat IM Teodor Anton (Sah Club Oltenia Craiova, 2425) in 40 moves in round 6 of the Romanian Super League, with less than four minutes on either clock from move 32.
Serbian Super League · Open · Round 5
Black pawns on b3 and e3: Tin wins a second game in two days
Schekachikhin 0–1 Tin
GM Jingyao Tin (Rudar Kostolac, 2602) beat IM Maksim Schekachikhin (Hercegovac Gajdobra, 2358) in 60 moves in round 5 of the Serbian Super League, a day after beating Karthikeyan.
14,351
tactics puzzles
rated 760 to 2800
116
positional exercises
no forced win in any of them
15
endgame drills
every label engine-verified
1,624
rated games
for Guess the Elo
31
languages
chess vocabulary translated, not guessed
0
accounts or trackers
no analytics, no adverts, nothing sold
The programme
Eight ways to be told the truth about your chess.
Two of them are free forever, because a trainer that will not let you play chess is a demo. The other five are the part that is sold.
I
Tactics
Positions with exactly one winning move, and a verdict the moment you play it.
Five a day on a free account.
14,351puzzles, rated 760 to 2800
II
Positional judgement
No forced win exists. Say who stands better, and then find the move that says why.
Five a day on a free account.
116quiet positions, engine-screened
III
Endgames
Canonical positions, played out against an engine that defends properly.
Five a day on a free account.
15drills, every label engine-verified
IV
Rush
A timed run. Solve as many as you can before the clock takes the rest.
Five runs a day on a free account.
V
Guess the Elo
A real rated game, played out move by move. How strong were these two?
Five a day on a free account.
1,624rated games, 800 to 2599
VI
Watch
Nine hundred games worth watching — and the moment you would have played differently, take it over.
Free, unlimited, always.
900games, every one decisive
VII
Play & coach
A full game at a strength you choose, with every move of yours graded as you play.
Free, unlimited, always.
VIII
Online
Two people, one clock, no engine anywhere near it.
Free, unlimited, always.
Read what each one actually does →
Or start with the tactical motifs, defined →
See it in motion
The fastest way to get better at chess? Know why every move worked. Brass Pawn tells you — every move, every game.
Every screen
The film
The Opening
A minute of chess, shot the way the game deserves: one warm light, a board in the dark, and the moment a knight settles on f7 and the game is already over.
Reel 1 · 1:12 · in production
The Opening
The title film is being shot. When it is cut, it goes here — in this frame, with captions, and set to load only when you ask for it.
The engine
Two engines, compiled into the app.
The coach is not a heuristic and not a language model with opinions. It is a top-ranked chess program searching the position in front of you, on your device, with no network anywhere in the loop. Stockfish and Reckless are both in there; you choose which one plays, grades and labels, and the other is a second opinion one setting away.
Move grading uses win probability rather than raw centipawns, because losing a hundred centipawns when you are already up a queen barely matters, and losing them in a level position is decisive. A trainer that shouts “blunder” when nothing happened stops being worth listening to.
Privacy
It collects two things: whether you are online, and your friends.
No analytics calls. No advertising. No third-party tracking of any kind. No account to create. Your training ratings, solved puzzles, review schedule, streaks and game history are stored in the app’s own container on your device, and deleting the app deletes them.
Online play goes through Apple’s Game Center, which carries the moves between the two devices and keeps the online ratings on its leaderboards. While the app is on your screen it also tells a small service of ours that you are online, so an invitation reaches you when you are there to play — forgotten five minutes after you leave, and off with one switch in Settings — and keeps the friends you make in the app until either of you removes the other. Purchases are handled entirely by the App Store — we never see your payment details.
What it costs
Playing is free. The training is what is sold.
Metered rather than locked. Nobody pays for a trainer they have not used, and a mode that refuses to open teaches nothing about what is behind it.
Brass Pawn Pro
Monthly
$3.99/month
- Every daily limit removed
- The full library: 14,351 puzzles
- Unlimited Rush, positional exercises and endgame drills
- Unlimited Guess the Elo
- Everything in Free, unchanged
One-off unlock
$39.99once
- The same, bought outright
- No renewal, no expiry
- Restores on your other devices
Prices shown are US App Store prices. Your local price is set by the App Store. There is no annual plan in between, because a third price is a third decision to make at the moment somebody wants to solve a puzzle. The whole story on pricing →
Questions
The four that get asked first.
- Does it need an internet connection?
- No. The engine, the puzzles and your progress are all on the device. It needs one for online play, which goes through Game Center, and for Today, which downloads the day’s games.
- Is there an account?
- There is none to create. Your training ratings and history live in the app’s own container on your device, and deleting the app deletes them; your online rating is on Game Center, under your Game Center account.
- What is free?
- Playing is free and stays free — against the engine, against a person over Game Center, and the nine hundred games in Watch — all unlimited. On top of that a free account gets five a day of each kind of training: five tactics puzzles, five Rush runs, five positional exercises, five endgame drills and five games to judge. The allowance resets at nine in the morning, local time.
- Why is there no advertising?
- Partly taste and partly licence. The app links two engines — Stockfish under the GPLv3 and Reckless under the AGPLv3 — and compiling a proprietary advertising SDK into the same binary would make the combined work undistributable under either. Selling the app is fine; copyleft has never forbidden charging. Bolting a closed SDK onto it is not.
Fin.
Find out what you are actually rated.
Requires an iPhone or iPad. Free to download. Free software under the GNU AGPL v3.