Magma Chess: Nice... but it ain't my fave.

There are more than 100 chess apps in Googleplay for Androiders. Although they are so many to try, very few contain enough juice. We are mostly facing beautiful interfaces, nice boards and very promising developer descriptions.

The truth however, is mostly a lot of ads, too quick levels (some really prefer this and vote one star if the engine plays too strong to beat ?!) and awful moves.

One good example is Magma Mobile's Chess. Everything seems fine until you wanna have a serious chess player in front of you.

There are plenty of levels up to "expert". This expert plays @1500 elo estimated and will not use more than 1 min per move even if you want it to. No time control settings like sec/move or game in x, just child to expert.

The program uses permanent brain too, which drains your battery pretty fast, for an average playing strength. And good news is that it can't be disabled.

I won't include this app in my upcoming rapid swisstroid rating competition which requires 30 seconds/move time control.

I may be reasonable to my oldies like C64's Grandmaster from 80s, but in 2014 a serious chess program should deliver more than cosmetic screen layouts to the enthousiast.

So this one should be great for toy lovers who want to have some fun gor 10 minutes and possibly beat a chess program before going back to Angry Birds.

Magma Chess is also available @ itunes for Apple users. There are paid versions for both Android and IOS in case somebody wants to pay money for exactly the same toy without ads.

I don't.