Zugwork

iOS app by Shadowfetch · App Store ID 6792956521 · iOS

Chess tactics have always been the most satisfying five seconds in games — the moment the geometry snaps into place. What they have never had is stakes.

Zugwork is a chess tactics game built as a roguelike run. You enter at a rating floor. Every position you solve raises it. Every fifth solve hands you a relic that changes how the rest of the run plays. One wrong move ends everything, and the board stays up to show you the line you missed.

A run lasts eight to twenty-five minutes. No two calculate the same way.

Eight Hundred Thousand Real Positions

Every position came out of a real game between real players. Zugwork carries 814,736 of them, curated from the open Lichess puzzle database and packed into the app itself — rated, tagged by motif, and annotated with the opening the game came out of. Nothing streams. Nothing is generated. The whole corpus is on your device the moment you install it.

Twelve Run Archetypes

The Long Climb takes everything the corpus has. Bare Boards is endgames only. Snap Judgement is one-move positions on half the clock for double the pay. The Mate Ladder starts at mate in one and deepens until you are calculating forced mates five moves out. Give It Away is sacrifices only. Nothing Forcing serves quiet moves and zugzwang, where there is no check or capture to anchor the calculation. Blindfold shows you the position for four seconds and then takes the pieces away.

Archetypes unlock as your ladder rating climbs.

Twenty-One Relics

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Questions: shadowfetchapps@gmail.com

Zugwork · App Store ID 6792956521 · Published by Shadowfetch · shadowfetch.com