Inside iPhone - We Love Touch We Love iPhone

.
Posted Tue, Nov 18, 2008 1:00 PM by Sam Gwilym
We recently wrote about the release of Chess with Friends (App Store, Free), a game which allows you to play Chess against anybody on your contact list, allowing you to make moves whenever it suits you.

When Chess with Friends was first released, it was only available in a handful of countries, due to Newtoy's servers only being able to handle contacts with 10-digit phonenumbers. As of this morning, however, Chess with Friends was added to all iTunes regions.

That's not all, though - Newtoy has also stated that they are changing the price of their Chess app from $4.99 to free, a move they say was motivated by seeing "the excitement that [their] '1000 free download' offer generated", preferring to "set the world on fire" before making a quick buck.

We've also had the chance to finally try out Chess with Friends myself, now that it's available to the world at large, and have been having a good time playing chess with the creators of Chess with Friends themselves. We were pleased to see that signing up was a fairly painless process, involving only putting in the details that you'd like to use to log in. One validation email later and we were good to go.

Inviting friends who don't yet have Chess for Friends creates a quick invite email for you, and now that the app itself is free we can't really imagine people are going to have much of an issue with downloading it and giving it a go. The option to go against a random opponent works well, and fortunately doesn't conceal the username of your opponent (you never know). There's also the Pass and Play move for those with more local friends, which works exactly how you'd expect it to.

The Games with Friends screen shows all of your Chess games, past and present, separated respectively by Your Move, Their Move, and Game Over. You can easily see what colour your pieces are from a quick glance, and you can also see when your opponent is actively looking at the game in play, signified by a pair of googley eyes.

Chess playing itself is simple, allowing you to move about pieces with a touch, and only making a move when you submit it, meaning you can't make a horrible mistake by mistouching. Captured pieces line the bottom of the board, and you can easily flick through past moves using a toggle at the bottom of the screen.

All in all, Chess for Friends is easily the most accessible and elegant form of Chess for the iPhone available, and it's now free. Yes please.

Article by AppleInsider.