Chess that doesn't steal your day.

Because it ships Stockfish, and Stockfish is licensed under the GPLv3, which is widely held to be incompatible with the App Store's terms. Downloading it here is the honest option rather than a worse one: the build is signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so Gatekeeper is satisfied, and updates arrive in the app itself, from this site, rather than through a store.

Not to play. The board, the engine, all nine opponents, the puzzles and your licence all work with the Wi-Fi off, and always will. One thing does use the network: once a day the updater bundled inside the app asks this site whether there's a newer version — carrying no account, no machine profile and no usage data, and there's a switch in Settings → Updates that turns it off. The app process itself still ships without the network entitlement at all, so that much is verifiable rather than a promise — run codesign -d --entitlements :- "Dyno Chess.app" and look for yourself. There is no sign-in and no analytics. This website is a separate thing and does count its visitors — without cookies and without any way to identify you; the privacy policy lists exactly what it records, the update check included.

Nothing breaks. You get 14 days of Pro when you first launch it, and after that the app quietly becomes the free version. The board, the island and all nine opponents keep working forever. You will never find your chess game held hostage.

Three. The licence is a signed file checked on your Mac, so activating does not require the internet either.

Yes, within 14 days, no reason required. Email dyno@bixxter.com and it gets refunded in full — you don't have to explain yourself. The refund policy spells out the details.

Dyno Chess is made and sold by Asatulla Dadabaev — one person, not a company. Support, refunds and lost licence keys all go to dyno@bixxter.com, and it's read by a person. The privacy policy and terms of sale are on one page.

Stockfish, running as a separate process over UCI, exactly as its licence intends. The full GPLv3 text ships inside the disk image alongside a link to the exact source revision the bundled binary was built from.

It's the whole feature, not a sample: you get your real rating, the rank ladder, the day streak and the theme breakdown from the first puzzle, and the app picks each one to sit just above your level. Only the count is limited. Three is about a coffee break, which is what a notch-sized board is for — and if you want to sit down and grind fifty, that's what Pro removes. The puzzles themselves come from the Lichess database, which is public domain and free forever at the source; we'd rather be upfront that what you're paying for is the volume and the machinery, not the file.

Three things. It shows your live sessions in a strip under the board — the project, what the session is doing and how long it has been at it. When one of them is blocked on you a small robot appears in the closed notch and waves until you answer, so you don't keep tabbing back to check. And clicking a row takes you to the terminal that session is running in: Terminal.app and iTerm2 land on the exact tab, everything else gets raised to the front. You can answer the permission prompt from the notch itself, as often as you like, with or without Pro. It works with Claude Code and Codex, and uses each one's documented hooks and nothing else — no screen reading, no accessibility API, no polling of your files.

It is built so it cannot. The hook exits successfully on every path it has, including a crash, a missing binary or a bad argument, and a hook that returns no decision means Claude Code carries on through its normal permission flow. If Dyno Chess isn't running, or you quit it halfway through a decision, the tool call proceeds. Hooks go into ~/.claude/settings.json only when you press Install, on the welcome card or in Settings → Agents, after a timestamped backup, appended next to your own entries rather than over them — and Remove takes out only the ones we added. If the app is deleted, the helper removes its own entries and gets out of the way.

Both are true, and the second is why the first still holds. Claude Code runs the hook, the hook hands the event to the app over a local socket inside your own account — file permissions, a same-user check and a per-install secret — and no packet is involved, so the app process still carries no network entitlement and codesign still proves it. What did change in 0.3 is that the same output now lists read-write exceptions for ~/.claude and ~/.dynochess, and Apple Events for the terminals it can jump to. All of them are named in the privacy policy, and none of them can send anything anywhere. The one piece of the download that does use the network is the updater helper, which ships in the bundle but runs outside the app itself, never sees a session, and asks about nothing but version numbers.

No. Dyno Chess is made by one person and is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by Anthropic. Claude and Claude Code are Anthropic's trademarks, used here only to say what the app works with. The integration is built on Claude Code's published hook interface, which Anthropic can change at any time — if that happens we'll follow it, but the licence you're buying is a licence to a chess app.

Yes. On a Mac without a physical notch the island draws itself as a pill at the top of whichever display you choose.

That is the shape, yes: the notch expands into a panel when you point at it and shrinks back when you leave, which is the behaviour people mean by the phrase. The difference is what is inside it. Most of the Mac apps built on that shape are a shelf — now playing, a file drop, a battery readout, ten small things. This one holds a chess game and your Claude Code sessions, and nothing else. Same idea, used for one purpose rather than ten.

Not as a status icon — the app puts nothing in the row of icons on the right. It lives in the notch itself, plus a narrow band either side of it: 360 points across when it is closed, of which the notch is 200. On a Mac with no physical notch it draws that same pill at the top of whichever display you choose, which ends up looking like a menu bar app that got bigger when you pointed at it.