1
Pick your villains.
Choose which apps need a puzzle gate — TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, X, whatever owns you. Chess Shield uses Apple's Family Controls so the block is real, not a notification you can swipe past.
For iPhone — coming to the App Store soon
Chess puzzles between you and the apps that drain you.
Chess Shield blocks Instagram, TikTok, and whatever else you put on the list until you solve a chess puzzle calibrated to your level. Less doom-scrolling. More pattern recognition. Your rating goes up while your screen time goes down.
How it works
2
Tap an app, see a puzzle.
iOS shows the Chess Shield lock screen instead. Tap "Solve a puzzle" and you're inside a puzzle calibrated to your rating — pulled from a curated subset of the Lichess puzzle database.
3
Solve, unlock for a few minutes.
Quick (1 min), Standard (5 min), or Long (30 min) of unlocked time per solve. When the timer's up, the shield re-engages automatically. Next open, next puzzle.
4
Your rating climbs while you scroll less.
Real Glicko-2 tracking. 52 tactical themes — fork, pin, smothered mate, zwischenzug, all of them. Insights show which patterns you've mastered and which still leak.
Who it's for
You play casually.
Around 1000 rated, want to actually improve, also tired of opening Instagram fifty times a day for no reason. Chess Shield's free tier gives you one app to block and six core tactical themes (mate-in-1/2, fork, pin, skewer, back-rank). Indefinitely. You'll outgrow neither in a year.
You're stuck plateauing.
1500+ rated. Your fork accuracy is 90%+. You've plateaued and you know it. Pro opens up mate-in-3+, discovered attacks, zwischenzug, endgames — the patterns that actually take you past 1500. Plus block as many apps as you want and get a weakness heatmap that tells you what to drill next.
Pricing
Free
$0
- Block 1 app
- 6 core tactical themes
- Real Glicko-2 rating tracking
- Unlimited puzzles, daily streak
Pro
$4.99 / mo · $39.99 / year
7-day free trial on yearly.
- All puzzle themes — advanced tactics & endgames
- Custom shield rules per app
- Unlimited blocked apps + websites + categories
- Advanced insights — weakness heatmap, full history
- Cloud backup of your progress
- 3 streak freezes per month