ChessCraft
June 13, 2025
More About ChessCraft
Many chess AI mobile games already exist, but only ChessCraft allows the player to create such wacky boards and pieces and immediately play a decent computer opponent.
Create new pieces with any combination of the 8 bishop or rook slides, plus a 7x7 grid of knight-like hops. Pieces can also enhance or restrict nearby pieces. Create new boards with any enabled or disabled tile up to 16x16. Place promotion rules for any piece, anywhere. Place tile rules like witch windows (teleporters), sanctuaries, and more. The computer AI opponent then uses concepts from computer science and graph theory to understand your creations and play against you.
When you share a board, your friends can play the AI too. Sharing creates a new web page just for you, like this:
https://www.chesscraft.ca/design?id=shape-variant1
ChessCraft is full and free with no ads, except for the occasional popup which asks you to buy ChessCraft Patron. If you become a patron, you won't see those interruptions anymore. If you're a teacher, student, or you cannot afford ChessCraft Patron, send me an email and I'll send you a special code.
Visit the website and send me an email if you have any feedback or questions. If you like the game, please rate it!
Latest Version
1.16.30
June 13, 2025
Frame of Mind
Board
Android
843,633
Free
com.FrameOfMindGames.ChessCraft
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User Reviews
Gordon Stein
3 years ago
Has a wide selection of interesting variants. I'm not a huge fan of regular chess, but I keep playing this. I agree with the review calling stalemates frustrating, but there's not much to be done with that since it's a rule of the standard game for a reason. Maybe adventure mode can give a minor award (since a tournament would give a half point), or there was an option to warn you before you caused a draw, especially due to repetition (since it's easier to have happen on the smaller boards).
Joseph Belanger
3 years ago
Great app, I got it last night and it's already one of my favorites. Just some ideas I thought of: adding inverted pictures for all of the standard chess pieces. A "if this piece can capture this turn it must" rule and a variant where you can choose not to capture but sacrifice the piece (inspired by checkers). And a board rule where if you if you click on a piece (outside of "?" mode) you must move it. Please keep up the good work!
Tripod Gamer
1 year ago
It's a great game, no ads, adventure mode is fun and i love how you can make your own board and pieces along with their own designs. a suggestion i have is that you could play with random people online. one problem i have is that your custom board just disappears and its getting really frustrating remaking it over and over again, please fix and ill change to 5 stars!! Thanks for fixing it!!
ejude
2 years ago
This game is incredible. You can create your own pieces with special abilities, then use them on custom boards. The adventure mode is great too, because it shows you what you can do with this app. It's completely free and has no ads. It does have a few bugs and annoyances, but they aren't too prominent. Even if you don't like making your own pieces, you can still use this app to create positions to improve your classic chess skill. The bad reviews are stupid, don't listen to them.
PV - Yeah
4 years ago
Works great, Editor's fine, and gameplay is pretty good. I just have some suggestions like 1. Custom Piece Sprites, maybe from your gallery, 2.And add a way to make the chess boards at least a little bigger in the editor. 3.and allow us to change the background while playing chess because the black background is a little boring. 4.Or maybe we can change the color scheme of the board checker pattern to other colors like, Green and Red or maybe an image we choose.
Awkward Commentator
4 years ago
Chesscraft is fun. It takes chess and transforms it into a campaign mode of challenges with different board spaces, piece set-ups, pieces themselves, rules, and goals. There are also blockades to enforce changing difficulties and collectibles to enforce changing strategies. All this plus a creator mode allowing you to test your own wacky ideas with bots or friends. Overall, a simple and silly chess game with plenty of boards to get you thinking. One complaint though is the odd music timing. 5/5.
Jonn Dominique Freedman
2 years ago
It's a fun game. It does bug out a little sometimes, but besides that, it allows for a very interactive game of chess and allows for creativity to blossom. Great game, highly recommend. (Edit). Hi there! Great fun game, but I was curious. I looked at the Creative Commons License for ChessCraft and there were unused pieces on the GitHub page. How would we get to use these pieces in game? If you could add them in that would be good to get new character skins.
Noname
1 year ago
This game is probably the best custom chess system available for now, but there's one problem I'm starting to see, sometimes when I finish making a new board and save it then get an ad for this game, I just ignore it and close the game because I did what I wanted to but when I relaunch it later, the next thing I know: the board I made is gone. So you should probably look into this because needing to replicate and make the board all over again isn't nice, I had to do it like 4 times because of it
Chris
1 year ago
So far, this app is everything I have been looking for. I was able to create a game that has dragons, rogues, and multiple other pieces with different abilities. The creativity you can have here is almost endless, with different faces you can use for each piece. You even have the ability to create your own board. I can't say anymore only because it would be wrong of me to ruin the surprise for every 1. I'll change to five stars once I have played around with the app more than a couple of hours.
Chris Thompson
4 years ago
Frankly the movement options are pretty limited. The piece creation doesn't allow for forced hopping pieces, think checkers, and anything more complex than rook or bishop movement is always treated as a 'jump' like a knight. Adventure mode is grindy, forcing you to replay levels on higher difficulties to get enough points to unlock all of the levels in the first place. In general, it's okay. If you wanted to recreate even basic fairy chess puzzles, than you won't find it here.
DarKingsGoon
1 year ago
Great game and allows you to make the chess pieces and boards of your dream. It's everything you could want from a game about chess and more. It works really well except when you make MASSIVE boards the game doesn't work too well and starts to glitch out. Sometimes when I make a board the game deletes it after I exit the app. Just bugs I would like to have fixed but other than that It's a great app, would recommend
A Google user
5 years ago
The only alt-chess game i have found worth playing. Adventure mode is fun and challenging. You can make your own peices and games then play them against ai, and i really like the range in ai dificulty. The lowest setting is super easy, which is good. The hardest setting is difficult but not impossible. Most of the games have a point to their uniqness. Only a few are just weird. Wishes: that existing variants like shogi and xanqi were included. Wish you could draw your own peice icons.
Stephen Braziel
2 years ago
Very good game, only problem apperent that is holding me back from a 5 star is when your in the editor, when you move finger to a different location, it tends to fight with you, and It's just e extremely twitchy. But other than that, it's a very good game. Would recommend. Edit. By the way, way to absolutely decimate all the 1 star reviewers.
Richey Baumann
4 years ago
OK game, but the AI is either poorly programmed or malicious; many, MANY times, games have been declared "Checkmate" when they aren't. Literally, the computer seems incapable of realizing that I have several options to break the check, and that the game is not legitimately over. Nothing is more frustrating than having to restart a 10 minute long fight on level 4 because the computer randomly declares checkmate when there isn't one.
Air Fryer
2 years ago
It's fun and silly. I do have a really hard time beating things in adventure mode, but I am really just here to play around in sandbox mode and I made a board where white makes a maze using boulders, the other player is able to move around a price that can fire a projectile at whites enemies(which are made by sacrificing a boulder in order to make a patrol bot). In the end it is pretty darn fun for being a free game. Also it doesn't have any adds.
Daniel Yuan
4 years ago
Great game. So far I've only played adventure, but it's pretty fun already. There are a few typos in some of the descriptions, but the reason I didn't give 5 stars was because of 2 things. First, I believe there is a wrong piece in front of the black tree in neebling (doe not lion). Second, I was trying to get the 2 seconds per turn badge and realized that it's basically impossible for levels 3 and 4 because they take a while to make a move and the timer seems to count their time.
James Blodgett
5 months ago
I put this as 5 stars a while back, but I forgot to add this bit. Is a good game, love the idea and games, it's super fun. One problem I have is that when you upload a board to the community, you lose it in your play menu, and you have to go back into the site and import it again. If it made a copy of the board automatically, that would be amazing. Another thing would be if you added a search bar to the boards menu so you don't have to scroll through everything to find a board.
Jon Boy
4 months ago
It's really neat to be able to try other kinds of chess and make my own chess like game. The developer was really nice and doesn't plague you with ads at all! The ai is pretty good & doesn't just repeat the same moves every game. But it really needs an undo button because I'm clumsy, it will misunderstand where I want to move a piece & puts it in the wrong spot and the game is usually ruined just like that. it's really frustrating. That's a feature request more than a complaint.
Amy Dutton
3 months ago
So much fun! I love all the different challenges and some of the funky pieces! (Some of the pieces I can't stand simply because I can't figure them out - why will a lion capture this deer but not that one??? How are you supposed to checkmate when some pieces will not target the king?) But aside from that, I still give this game 5 stars because it's so much fun! I love that the levels are realistically challenging; I can almost always beat a level 3 computer, sometimes a level 4 but not level 5.
Cari Rutland
2 months ago
I am really enjoying the adventure mode. It's the coolest cheese game I have come across. I'm usually burned out after a game or two against a "computer," but not this game. The only thing I wish they would improve on is to better explain how pieces that aren't a classic cheese piece move. I really like that element of this app, but it's hard to defend or make strategic moves when the picture they show is so limited. Otherwise still worth a try. Still 5 stars.
