Chess-wise is a chess playing app for the iPhone, iPod touch and the iPad. It contains many nice features not found in any other chess program, like having an interface to the 6-men tablebase of Nalimov, and containing a large database of professional games.

A lot of attention has been paid to the graphics, with the aim to make it look beautiful, without any distracting bling-bling. All moves are animated. Captured pieces fade away. You can choose from 20 different sets of pieces.

Chess-wise has VoiceOver integration, making it the first mobile chess application which is fully accessible to blind users.

PLAY

Games can be either for 1 or 2 players, and either with or without a clock. When playing without a clock in landscape mode, the view is 3 dimensional. Of course, all the standard features like swapping sides or rotating the board are available.

ONLINE

Chess-wise contains an interface to the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS). Play online against other people, get a rating or observe games played by masters.

ANALYZE

Chess-wise contains a separate screen for analyzing positions.  You can try out side variations and return to the main line with a simple double tap on the corresponding move in the move list. You can ask the engine for an evaluation, or look up the ECO code for a position.

SETUP

You can setup a position using an intuitive interface.

TABLEBASE

And as long as there are no more than 6 pieces on the board, the exact evaluation is shown below the board. A really unique feature!

REPLAY

Look through the game you just played, and email the game notation, or copy it to the clipboard.

DATABASE

Chess-wise contains a large database with over 78000 games from over 700 tournaments, and a PGN viewer to play through these games.

ONLINE SEARCH

Another unique feature is online search in a database with 3.5 million games. Search by player name and ECO code. How are the grandmasters handling your favorite openings?

EXERCISES

Finally, there is a collection of 300 exercises which keeps track of which ones you've solved.

Each of these features alone is worth the price of Chess-wise! And regular updates expand the possibilities of Chess-wise even more.

Chess-wise is based on the Tjes engine (developed by me in 1996), and has played on the Internet Chess Club (ICC). The engine contains:

- an opening book

- ECO classification

Some more technical details:

- bitboard representation

- alpha/beta search with a search window

- partial move ordering

- 2 killer moves are searched first

- an extra ply after forced moves

- transposition tables (including a pawn hash)

Enjoy!