Zugwork

About this app

Made for a clear purpose.

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.