Chess is Live in Piece of Cake 1.4

Piece of Cake started with one game and a promise: more would follow, all on the same subscription, with nothing extra to buy. Switch became three games when Gin Rummy and Farkle arrived in July. Chess is now live in version 1.4 on both the App Store and Google Play.

The Whole Game, Not a Simplified One

Chess is the most-implemented game in software, and a great many of those implementations quietly skip the awkward parts. Ours doesn't. Castling on both sides, en passant, promotion to any piece you like, check, checkmate — it's all there, exactly as FIDE wrote it down.

More usefully, only legal moves are ever offered. Tap a piece and its legal squares light up. You can't move into check, you can't leave your king in check, and you can't castle through an attacked square, because the board simply won't let you. If you've ever lost twenty minutes to a position that turned out to be illegal three moves ago, you'll appreciate what that's worth.

Draws are handled properly too, which is where a lot of casual chess apps give up. Stalemate, threefold repetition, the fifty-move rule and insufficient material are all detected automatically — so a drawn game ends as a draw rather than shuffling two lone kings around an empty board forever. You can also just offer a draw: your opponent accepts or declines, and making a move declines it too. Against an AI opponent the answer comes straight back, and it will take the draw when it judges itself to be worse off.

A Clock, But Only If You Want One

Here's the tension we had to resolve. Chess has a clock. Piece of Cake is built for games that span days — you take a turn on the bus, your friend takes theirs after dinner, and nobody is expected to sit still for it.

So chess in Piece of Cake is untimed by default. A clock is something you deliberately opt into when you create the table, and when you do, it's the tournament standard: a Fischer increment clock. Each side starts with a set time, your clock runs only on your own turn, and the increment is added back after every move you make. Run out and you lose on time — unless your opponent has no way to checkmate you, in which case it's a draw, exactly as the rulebook says.

Four presets cover the range:

• Blitz 5|3 — five minutes each, three seconds back per move. For when you're both in the app together and want it settled.
• Rapid 15|10 — enough time to actually think.
• Classical 60|30 — a proper long game.
• Daily 3 days +1 — correspondence chess. Three days on the clock, a full day added back with every move.

That last one is the interesting one. Correspondence chess used to mean postcards; here it means the same table you use for everything else, just running at a gentler tempo. The clock is kept on our servers rather than your phone, so closing the app, losing signal or swapping devices doesn't cost you time you didn't spend.

Two Players, and the Second One Can Be a Robot

Chess needs exactly two — no adapting this one for a 14-seat table. Colours are drawn at random when the game starts, so a rematch on the same table usually swaps you over, and nobody gets to hoard white.

If your opponent isn't around, add an AI opponent from the table settings and play whenever you like. Same as every other game in the app: it's there to fill a seat, not to gatekeep the fun.

Also in This Release: The Wall Of Shame

Piece of Cake's leaderboards already rank you by wins, games, turns and cards played. This release adds two more boards, and one of them is not a compliment.

The Wall Of Shame ranks players by their average game duration. Someone in your group is the slowest. Everyone has suspected who. Now there's a table with their name at the top of it. There's a forfeits board too, for the people who leave rather than lose.

Tidier Tables, and a Few Things Fixed

Finished tables used to pile up with no way to clear them — you could only delete a table before it had ever been played. Now you can delete any table you own once it's no longer in progress, with a confirmation step so it doesn't happen by accident. Abandoned tables where every human has left are swept up automatically, which mostly means tables full of bots no longer live forever.

The tables list got a rework at the same time: All, Mine, Joined and Public tabs, games in progress pinned to the top wherever you sort, and each card now telling you whose turn it is instead of who set the table up. The question you actually have is "is this waiting on me?", so that's what the card answers now.

On the fixes side: the "Reconnecting…" banner could get stuck on screen indefinitely after a dropped connection, which was as alarming as it sounds and is now properly resolved — and tapping around while it's showing no longer piles up duplicate requests behind it. There's a new mute all sounds switch in your profile if you'd rather play in silence, and signing up for push notifications now copes with a flaky network instead of quietly giving up.

Same Tables, Same Subscription

Chess slots into everything Piece of Cake already does. Create a private table and send a join link in any chat app, or open a public one. Play it out in an evening or stretch it over a fortnight with quiet turn alerts. Every move is validated on our servers, so nobody can cheat.

And the pricing promise holds: one subscription, every game in the catalogue — Switch, Gin Rummy, Farkle, Chess, and everything still to come. No coin packs, no ads, no per-game purchases. The current app is €1.99 a month or €9.99 a year in Ireland, with a 7-day free trial.

How to Play

1. Update or download Piece of Cake from the App Store or Google Play (version 1.4 with Chess)
2. Create a table and pick Chess in the game picker
3. Choose a time control — or leave it on No clock and play at your own pace
4. Invite a friend, or add an AI opponent and warm up first

Want the full rules before you sit down? They're one tap away in-app under Profile → Rules → Chess, or you can read them on the Chess page on the Piece of Cake site.

Got a game you'd like to see at the table next? Tell us through the contact page — four down, and the catalogue is only getting bigger.