It lives in your MacBook's notch. Hover, play a move, get back to work.
↑ Psst… hover the notch, then actually play a move. It's a real game.
This is a Mac app — the playable demo needs a wider screen. Open this page on your Mac to try it.
From someone who hangs a queen to full-strength Stockfish.
The weak levels don't just think less. They blunder the way people do.
No window to arrange, no tab to close. The board leaves when your pointer does.
A real clock ticking in the notch while you work. 1+0 through 15+10.
Hot-seat mode. Pass the laptop across the table.
No account, no telemetry, no network entitlement. Check it with codesign yourself.
Your history is a text file you can take anywhere. No lock-in.
Works over full-screen apps, across Spaces, on every display.
Nine difficulty bands from the Lichess database, picked to sit just above your rating. Three a day free, unlimited on Pro.
A wrong move doesn't end the puzzle. It draws what the opponent does to you, then lets you try again.
$0
Strength is never the paywall. The engine plays as hard as you ask, free.
$14.99 once · 3 Macs
Chess.com Diamond is $119.99 a year. Every year.
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 it updates itself directly.
No, and it cannot use one. The app ships without the network entitlement at all, so this is verifiable rather than a promise — run codesign -d --entitlements :- "Dyno Chess.app" and look for yourself. There is no account, no sign-in and no analytics.
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 debixxter@gmail.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 debixxter@gmail.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.
Yes. On a Mac without a physical notch the island draws itself as a pill at the top of whichever display you choose.