Zugwork
Chess tactics as a roguelike
$1.99 · Designed for iPad. Not verified for macOS.
Real positions from real games become a chess-puzzle roguelike. Draft relics, climb the rating ladder, and lose everything to one wrong move. Fully offline.
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
Steady Hand banks a takeback. Metronome slows the clock's decay. Gambit Ledger
doubles the value of sacrifices. Ascendant climbs the ladder sixty percent
faster for larger scores and shorter lives. Clairvoyance lights both squares of
the move you cannot find. Double or Nothing does exactly what it says.
Three offers, one pick, every fifth solve.
A RATING FOR EVERY MOTIF
Zugwork tracks your strength separately across fifty-four tactical motifs —
fork, pin, skewer, deflection, interference, zugzwang, and every named mating
net from Anastasia's to Vukovic's. The Motif Codex explains each one and lets
you drill it at your own level for that motif specifically. You will find out
what you are actually bad at, which is usually not what you assumed.
THE GRUDGE BOOK
Every position that has ever ended a run is filed and served back to you until
you beat it. Work the book in practice mode, where a mistake shows you the
answer instead of ending anything.
A DAILY RUN, WITHOUT A SERVER
Everyone playing on the same day gets the same archetype and the same positions
in the same order, derived arithmetically from the date. It needs no connection
and no account, because nothing is fetched — your device works out the seed on
its own.
SIX BOARDS TO EARN
Slate, walnut, marble, newsprint, brass and obsidian, each with its own
procedurally generated grain and matching piece set. Unlocked by playing.
NO ENGINE, BY DESIGN
Zugwork ships no chess engine. Every solution line arrives with its position, so
validation is a comparison rather than a search. The legal-move generator that
filters your input and spots checkmate was written from scratch and verified
against published perft node counts.
WHAT IS NOT IN THIS APP
No advertising. No in-app purchases. No subscription. No account or sign-in. No
analytics, no tracking, no telemetry. No network requests at all — Zugwork works
identically in airplane mode, on a plane, on the underground, or with the
device permanently offline. Your ratings, runs, grudges and unlocks live in a
single file inside the app's own container and never leave your device.
One purchase. The whole game.
Ratings & Reviews
- This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
The developer, Robert Corbin, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Accessibility
The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. Learn More
Information
- Seller
- Robert Corbin
- Size
- 81.1 MB
- Category
- Puzzle
- Compatibility
Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
- iPhone
Requires iOS 17.0 or later. - iPad
Requires iPadOS 17.0 or later. - Mac
Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later. - Apple Vision
Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
- iPhone
- Languages
- English
- Age Rating
4+
- 4+
- Copyright
- © 2026 Robert Corbin
