How can we help?

Not yet. It's coming soon to the App Store and Mac App Store. To try early builds, email us and we'll send TestFlight access as builds are ready.

iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV.

No. The app works without one.

English.

Slate Chess is free to start. Game Review and the coach are part of Premium, which comes as a Monthly, Yearly or Family plan, with a 7-day free trial. Plans and current prices are on the Slate Chess home page.

Game Review with the coach, the mistake deck, and drills built around your own weak spots. Playing Slate, your library with iCloud sync, importing games, the scoresheet scanner (with no limits), engine analysis, the puzzle library and the progress report card in the app are free and stay free.

Credits, and the unit is a game rather than a session. The first time you use the coach or Game Review on a game it costs one, and that game then has both features for good — come back to it a month later and it is still unlocked. So three credits are three games you can study as deeply as you like, not three single uses.

No. Once a game is unlocked it stays unlocked, however many times you review it or summon the coach.

Yes, two ways. Every install starts with three free games, which do not expire, and paid plans start with a 7-day free trial. If you cancel during the trial you are not charged.

Yes, with the Family plan. It covers up to six people in an Apple Family Sharing group. Everyone keeps their own Apple Account, so each person has their own games, their own rating and their own improvement plan — you are sharing the subscription, not a library. Monthly and Yearly are for one person.

All of them. A subscription covers iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV, as long as you are signed in to the same Apple Account.

In Settings on your iPhone or iPad, tap your name, then Subscriptions. On a Mac, in App Store → your name → Account Settings. Cancelling stops the renewal; you keep Premium until the period you have paid for ends.

Refunds are Apple's to give, not ours. Use reportaproblem.apple.com and sign in with your Apple Account. If something in the app went wrong, tell us as well — it may be a bug we can fix.

Open the Premium screen and press Restore Purchases, and make sure the device is signed in to the Apple Account that bought it. If it still says no, write to us with the date of purchase.

Nothing. Your games, your annotations and every review you have already run stay readable. You lose the ability to run new reviews and to summon the coach, not the work you have already done.

Not to us. Game analysis runs on your device, no account is needed, and Slate Chess has no server to upload to. Your games are stored in your own iCloud account so they appear on all your devices; we cannot read them. See the Privacy Policy.

The engine runs on your device and your analysis is done there. Your games sync between your own devices through your own iCloud account. That storage is yours, not ours: we have no access to it and no way to read it.

No. Slate Chess has no analytics, no tracking and no account, and it never contacts a Slate Chess server. Apple gives us aggregated download and crash reports that are not about you individually. On the App Store it is listed as Data Not Collected.

Deleting the app removes everything stored on that device. Games synced through iCloud live in your own iCloud account, which you manage through Apple's iCloud settings.

Yes. Import a PGN file, or type a Lichess or Chess.com username to import that player's public games. Comments, variations and annotation marks come through. Importing by username needs no sign-in or password, and the request goes from your device straight to that site, not through us.

Yes. Slate shows a weekly progress report card in the app: your rating trend, the mistakes you are making less often, and your recent games. You can share it as a PDF with anyone you choose. Sharing is manual, so only the people you send it to see it, and we never see it.

Yes, as a PGN, with everything you have added to them. They are your games.

Yes, all three, in the standard formats.

Yes, with the camera. Check what it read before saving; handwriting is handwriting.

Two players on one device, or start a game inside a Messages conversation. There is no online play against strangers.

Entirely. The engine is inside the app.

No. Please don't use Slate Chess to get outside help in rated games, tournaments or competitions, on any platform.

At full strength, Slate plays on Lichess as the bot account slate-engine, where its blitz Elo is currently about 2,470 (see it live). Bot ratings form their own pool, mostly games against other bots, so they don't translate into human or FIDE ratings. In the app you rarely meet full strength: you choose a level, from beginner to grandmaster, each with an approximate human rating.

Level ratings are approximate and calibrated against models of human play. They describe the kind of challenge to expect, not how any particular player of that rating would play.

It is a rating of your games against Slate, kept the same way clubs and servers keep one. It is not a FIDE rating and it is not transferable, but it moves for the same reasons and it is an honest measure of your own progress.

Casual games do not count, and a game resigned in the first few moves does not count either.

Yes. The engine on its own is free for personal use, analysis, engine testing and rating lists. It is a UCI engine with no interface of its own, so you run it inside a chess GUI or a testing tool. Coaching, Game Review and the human-like play levels are in the Slate Chess app, not in the free download. Download the engine.

Macs with Apple silicon (macOS 15 or later), 64-bit Windows 10 or 11, Linux on x86-64 (with a faster build for CPUs from 2013 on) and Linux on arm64. There is no Intel Mac build. Each download is listed with its requirements on the engine page.

Add it to a UCI chess GUI as a new engine and point it at the slate file. The UCI Engine Guide covers installing, options, checking your download and fixing problems.

The Mac engine is not notarized by Apple yet, so macOS can block a downloaded copy the first time. The fix takes one Terminal command, or one click in System Settings: see the macOS fix.

The Windows engine is not code-signed yet, so Windows may show "Windows protected your PC" the first time. Choose More info, then Run anyway. If a DLL is missing, install Microsoft's Visual C++ Redistributable (x64). See the Windows notes.

About 3,220 on a CCRL-like scale. That is our own measurement against public engines (one thread, 10 seconds plus 0.1 seconds a game, Apple M3 Max), not an official rating-list figure, and it cannot be compared with the Lichess bot rating above, which is a different pool.

Yes. You may publish results, games, ratings and statistics, and pass on unmodified copies of the download to other testers of a rating list. The licence has the details.

Not without written permission. Embedding Slate in another product or service, selling or bundling it, and modifying or reverse-engineering it all need permission. Write to support@slatechess.com.

No. It writes no files, makes no network connections and sends nothing anywhere. Downloading it from this site is recorded in our normal server logs: see the Privacy Policy.

Not Chess960 in version 0.5.3. It has no opening book or tablebase support of its own; use your GUI's.

No. Please don't use Slate, the engine or the app to get outside help in rated games, tournaments or competitions, on any platform.

Analysis is real work and it uses the processor. Slate does less of it in Low Power Mode and when the device is already hot. You can lower the time limit and the number of lines in Settings → Engine.

Both devices must be signed in to the same Apple Account with iCloud on. Sync is Apple's, and it can take a few minutes.

Flat paper, even light, no shadow across the page. Correct the moves it got wrong before saving — and send us the photo if it was badly out, because that is how the scanner improves.

Report it on our GitHub bug tracker, or write to us at support@slatechess.com. Tell us the device, what you were doing, and the game if you can export it.

Use the form at the top of this page to ask us a question, or report a bug on GitHub.