AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Schmess
Solo dev here. Schmess is chess with the turn structure removed. Both players move whenever they have a free slot, and every piece freezes on a cooldown after it moves. It's on a half board, with 100+ puzzle stages. If two people played this over a physical board they'd scrape each other's fingers raw - that's roughly the tempo. Plays in the browser, no signup. 29 stages free, one-time unlock for the rest ($3.99 / Rs 149). No subscription, no ads. It's the second of a few small-board variants I'm building (halfchess was the first, more coming). Building a chess engine for a game with no…
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 1CA
2021 · chrisbutner.github.io · its alternatives →
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Half chess▲76A casual chess game where games only last 5 minutes
2020 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
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Spicy Chess▲76Hello! I created SpicyChess(https://spicychess.com) because I wanted a tactics training app that would have the following features: - Spaced Repetition. - Countdown time to simulate blitz Chess where you have to find the best move quickly. - The ability to save puzzles for later review. I'd love to hear any feedback that you may have !
2023 · spicychess.com · its alternatives →
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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…
2025 · offchess.com · its alternatives →
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Chess pattern training. No timers, no streaks, no ratings.
Jun 2026 · boxwoodchess.com · its alternatives →
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Guess AI Engine Tournament Position, Fun Stury Tool. Play Chess Without Moving Pieces. Crazy Chess is a Variant of Random Fisher and Really Bad Chess. Because of the rearranged pieces, players cannot use typical chess opening moves. study tool to understand chess, and learning how to read the board.
2017 · ba.net · its alternatives →
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Chess, but each square also follows the rules of Conway's Game of Life. Only your own pieces count as neighbours when deciding births/deaths. For births, an empty square must have 3 neighbours for 2 consecutive turns. For deaths, a piece must have 3 neighbours for 3 consecutive turns. This is a simple proof of concept I made with python and curses. You can play with a friend locally or over a socket connection. Controls: Arrow keys to move the cursor, enter/space to select and move a piece, u or backspace to undo a move, r to redo a move, q or escape to quit, s to perform a move…
2023 · gist.github.com · its alternatives →
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BrainyChess▲83Play, practice, analyze, and save chess games online!
2016 · apps.apple.com · its alternatives →
- 10OC
My personal project: https://github.com/leonidasdeim/chasse Goal was to build session based chessboard game without any rules - to play just like oldschool over the board. Just create new board and share link with a friend. I would appreciate any feedback and github star. Thanks!
2023 · chasse.fun · its alternatives →
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Storm Chess▲63Unique real-time chess without a queue for a move
2022 · storm-chess.com · its alternatives →
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Chess Twist▲29I continue my experiment of transposing classic games onto an irregular grid. I've previously released variants of minesweeper and checkers. And now I'd like to share my variant of Chess. Chess can be a pretty punishing game, but I thought this was nevertheless a way to make it even more challenging by making it trickier to anticipate your opponent, even though both players still have the same information. From the playtests I've done, that challenge is pretty compelling. It also seems to be more fun at 2 people, where both players keep surprising one another.
2024 · polyreplay.com · its alternatives →
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Play chess online for free on Chess.com with over 250 million members from around the world. Have fun playing with friends or challenging the computer!
2011 · multiplayerchess.com · its alternatives →
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Halfchess▲69Learn to be a better Chess player, playable in your browser
2017 · halfchess.com · its alternatives →
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BreakBase.com. Play your favorite games, with anyone you
2012 · breakbase.com · its alternatives →
- 16CB
2015 · mancereus.github.io · its alternatives →
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Hey everyone, I have been trying to build a terminal based app for sometime now and this is an attempt at trying to build a chess app that one can play right inside terminal. I was inspired by `chess-tui`[1] which is a rust based project and was looking to build something similar using python. Luckily I stumbled upon textual[2] recently and it made my task of building this far more easier than I thought. [1] https://github.com/thomas-mauran/chess-tui [2] https://github.com/textualize/textual
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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ChessWoodie▲26I built ChessWoodie as a platform for structured chess tactics training. Most puzzle trainers give you random puzzles. That can help calculation, but it also means you rarely see the same pattern twice, which makes it harder to build fast pattern recognition. ChessWoodie organizes puzzles into courses where the same positions repeat across training cycles. The approach is inspired by the Woodpecker Method: solving the same puzzles repeatedly until the patterns become automatic. You can try it directly in the browser. There’s a guest login if you want to jump straight into solving puzzles.…
Jul 2026 · chesswoodie.com · its alternatives →
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Minimalist daily chess habit game
Dec 2025 · dailychessblitz.com · its alternatives →
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Two years ago I sat down to build a chess engine for my kids' Christmas present. Wanted it to play badly enough to be beatable but not randomly bad: different styles so they could choose what to face. While building those styles I noticed the choices started looking like actual historical players' tendencies. Went looking. Turns out: given enough games from one person, you can extract enough of their decision pattern to reproduce it. Two years later, 41 players, ~3,000 games each. Tal sacrifices unsoundly. Morphy attacks like it's 1850. Capablanca grinds endgames. Same engine underneath,…
Apr 2026 · playchessgate.com · its alternatives →
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Hey there! I just finished a youtube video explaining our donut chess in detail: https://youtu.be/iRcfHCPFgkM So I thought it'd be cool to show it off here too- it can be played around with at mchess.io/donut - you can also set up an AI or online game on the site. This is all indie dev work from a couple friends and myself.
Nov 2025 · mchess.io · its alternatives →
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DualChess▲25Chess — but a mini-game decides every capture
Jun 2026 · dualchess.com · its alternatives →
- 23
Turn studying into a game — and win every day
Nov 2025 · scholawise.com · its alternatives →
- 24IB
Hi HN, here is my humble weekend project. I couldn’t find any similar utilities online that would let me download all of my chess games, so I decided to make one. It’s definitely imperfect, so please let me know if you have any feedback!
2023 · chessgamedownloader.fly.dev · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →