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Yalta Chess is a three-player chess variant played on a hexagonal board of 96 squares organized in three sectors. Each player has a full set of standard chess pieces. The game uses standard chess rules adapted for three players: the player who first puts a king in check wins if that king is mated.
If a player has no legal moves and is in check, that player is mated. The winner is whichever opponent first placed the mated king in check during the current check sequence. Yalta Chess tracks this automatically and ends the game with a clear announcement of the winner.
Three options:
At low difficulty levels (Beginner, Easy), the bot deliberately picks among its best moves, not always the very best, so the games feel different and casual players can enjoy a beatable opponent. Intermediate and Hard still vary, but only between moves of similar value; once out of its opening book, Expert always plays the move it rates best. And in three-player chess, a good move can look strange: the bot prepares for the worst, as if both opponents were teaming up against it — without assuming either of them would let itself be mated just to hand the win to the other.
Five levels, each measured stronger than the one below it, in games where one bot plays alone against two bots of the next level up.
Every bot first pauses for half a second. Beginner and Easy then play almost instantly; Intermediate, Hard and Expert think longer, at most about 3, 6 and 10 seconds. Their strength comes from a fixed amount of calculation, not from the clock: that time limit is only a safeguard, and on a recent iPhone or Mac it almost never cuts the search short. On a slower device (Apple TV, older iPhone, many Android devices) it can, and the bot then plays below its usual level.
The most likely reason is that the move would leave your own king in check. Other reasons include castling through an attacked square, capturing en passant after the moment has passed (en passant must be played immediately after the double pawn advance), or attempting a promotion to an invalid piece type. The board highlights all your legal moves when you select a piece.
Yes, in solo and pass-and-play games. Tap the Undo button (or press Cmd-Z on Mac and iPad with a keyboard). Undo is disabled in multiplayer to keep both clients consistent.
Yes. At the end of every game, the outcome card offers three actions: View the game in its structured Y-PGN form, Share the .ypgn file (e.g. by Mail or Messages), or Share image to export a high-resolution PNG of the final board.
Y-PGN is the Yalta-Chess flavor of standard chess PGN, adapted to a 96-square board with files a–l and ranks 1–12, three players (White, Red, Black), and three-result outcomes (e.g. 1-0-0 when White wins). A standard PGN reader will not understand a Y-PGN file correctly; the .ypgn extension makes the difference clear.
Yes. Solo, pass-and-play, and local Wi-Fi multiplayer all work without an internet connection. Only Game Center (online games, achievements, leaderboards) and Google Play Games (achievements, leaderboards) need one.
To find the other players' devices nearby when you host or join a local multiplayer game, through Apple's MultipeerConnectivity framework (which can also use peer-to-peer Wi-Fi or Bluetooth) or Bonjour. It isn't used for anything else. Yalta Chess asks for no other permission. On Android, the app asks for no permission at all.
iOS 26+ on iPhone (portrait), iPadOS 26+ on iPad (any orientation), macOS 26+ on Mac, and tvOS 26+ on Apple TV (4th generation or newer), where you move the board cursor with the Siri Remote's touch surface, and Android 12+ on phones and tablets.
Inside the app, tap the Info button and then Rules. You'll find a complete walkthrough of the board layout, piece movement on the three-sector topology, special moves (castling, en passant, promotion), and the three-player check / mate / stalemate logic, illustrated section by section. On Android, tap Yalta rules on the new game screen.