Chess for Apple Watch you cannot mis-tap.
ScrollChess is chess for Apple Watch. The Digital Crown moves a crosshair from piece to piece, and a tap anywhere on the screen confirms. Because the tap carries no coordinates, a 22.5 pt square never has to be a touch target.
$6.99 once, €7.99 in the euro area. No subscription.
Why a crosshair instead of your finger
Apple's own minimum for something you tap is 44 pt. A square on the largest Apple Watch, the Ultra, is 22.5 pt, and on a 40 mm watch about 17.5 pt. Every chess app on the wrist asks you to hit that square anyway.
ScrollChess does not ask. The crown aims, so the tap only has to happen, without having to land anywhere in particular. Measured on an Apple Watch Ultra, that came to 4.9 seconds per move with no missed targets across 60 moves.
What it looks like
The crown lands on a piece. The tap that follows can be anywhere.
A puzzle short enough to finish before your arm gets tired.
Solved, and the streak that comes with it.
The complication puts today's puzzle one tap from the face.
What you get
An engine that plays like a person
4 levels, written for this app. Weak levels choose among moves the search already likes, so they are inaccurate rather than absurd. They never hand you a queen.
A daily puzzle
1048 puzzles rated 800–1300, chosen for lines short enough to solve on a wrist. One a day, with a streak.
A game on the phone too
The iPhone app plays full games with direct taps, and two people can share one phone. The board turns itself around between moves. Each device keeps its own games, though: nothing syncs between the watch and the phone yet.
Nothing to sign into
The engine, the puzzles and your games are on the device. No account, no analytics, no server. It works the same in aeroplane mode, and the board can be played with VoiceOver on both platforms.
Built for the watch first
The watch app runs on its own, playing full games and the daily puzzle without the phone nearby, and the engine is fast enough to do it. A rules benchmark on the watch itself, not on a Mac, runs at 52,000 positions per second. A search does less than that, and it was still enough to decide the whole engine design. Add a complication and today's puzzle is one tap from the watch face.
The rules, the engine and the piece artwork are this app's own. The puzzles come from a public-domain (CC0) database and were each replayed through those rules before shipping.