support@brasspawn.com
For anything: a bug, a wrong puzzle, a question about a purchase, or a disagreement with an evaluation. Write in English or Bulgarian.
Support
Ask a person
There is no ticket system, no chatbot and no help centre with 400 articles in it. There is an email address and an issue tracker, and both reach the person who wrote the app.
Issue tracker
GitHub issues
For anything you would rather were public — and for anything you want other people to be able to find later, which is most bug reports.
If a puzzle is wrong
Send four things and it can be checked in a minute.
- The FEN shown on the puzzle screen — tap and hold to copy it.
- The move you played, and the move the app said was right.
- Which mode you were in.
- The app version, from the About screen.
Puzzles do occasionally disagree with a deeper search, and the disagreements cluster on long, quiet, highly rated positions whose point lies deeper than the verification searched. That is a limit of the check rather than a fault in the puzzle — but it is worth knowing which ones, and the only way to know is if you say.
Questions
Asked often enough to write down.
- Does it need an internet connection?
- No. The engine, the puzzles and your progress are all on the device. The single exception is online play, which needs Game Center to reach the other person.
- Is there an account?
- There is none to create. Your ratings and history live in the app’s own container on your device, and deleting the app deletes them.
- 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.
- Are my puzzle ratings the same as a FIDE rating?
- No, and they run several hundred points higher. They measure progress against yourself, not strength against a field.
- Where do the puzzles come from?
- Most are from the Lichess puzzle database, released into the public domain under CC0, carrying ratings calibrated against millions of real solving attempts. The rest were mined locally by having Stockfish play itself and keeping only positions where one move is far better than every alternative.
- Can I see the source code?
- Yes. The app carries the GNU Affero General Public License version 3 — the terms Reckless brings with it, which the GPLv3 of Stockfish permits combining with — and the complete corresponding source is published on GitHub.
- Which engine am I playing?
- Whichever you chose in Settings. Stockfish and Reckless are both compiled into the app, and one of them plays, grades and labels everything. They are not equivalent: Stockfish can be asked to play anywhere from about 1400 to full strength, while Reckless has no strength limiter and plays at full strength or not at all.
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