The Brilliant Chess

Chess is the most thoroughly solved problem in mobile gaming. There are hundreds of chess apps, several of them excellent and free, so building another one only makes sense if you are answering something the good ones do not.

The thing they mostly assume is connectivity. Almost every strong chess app treats an internet connection as a given, which is a reasonable assumption in some markets and a poor one here. We wanted a chess game that was fully playable with two people in a room and no network at all, and that behaved correctly when a connection dropped mid-game rather than simply losing the match.

We built three distinct play modes rather than one with fallbacks: online multiplayer, pass-and-play on a single device, and direct Bluetooth play between two phones with no internet involved. Bluetooth is the one nobody else bothers with, and it is the mode that makes the app useful on a bus, in a village with no coverage, or during a power cut.

The move engine and rules validation were written to run entirely on the device, so the board is always authoritative locally and never waits on a server to tell you whether your knight can move. Online play then reconciles state rather than driving it, which is what makes a dropped connection recoverable instead of fatal.

On the interface we went in the opposite direction from most of the category: no clutter around the board, no interruption between moves, and piece and board styling that stays legible on a small screen rather than being decorative at the cost of readability.

Because this is our own product rather than a client build, we also carried it through the whole post-launch reality ourselves: store listing, review submission, crash reports from real devices, and version updates.

The Brilliant Chess ships with online multiplayer, local pass-and-play, and offline Bluetooth play, and is distributed both through the store and as a direct APK download from this site.

It is one of the products that gives us the right to talk about app development at all. Everything we know about store review, crash triage, and the difference between a build that works and a build people keep, we learned partly here.